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Dry Lima Beans

A side dish of cooked lima beans seasoned with cream, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dry Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the beans in warm water.

  2. Soak for 3 hours, then drain.

Cook and serve

  1. Cover the beans with boiling water.

  2. Cook steadily for 1 to 2 hours until tender.

  3. Drain off the water.

  4. If almost dry, add cream, butter mixed with a little flour, salt, and pepper.

  5. Remove from heat after 5 minutes.

  6. Serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Their starch softens during cooking, giving the beans a tender, creamy body.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, making the beans rich and smooth.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, rounded flavor.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a light sauce that coats the beans.

The step that matters

Adding the cream and butter-flour mixture. Once the cream and flour are added, the mixture should be heated gently and removed from heat on time. Boiling it hard can make the cream separate and the flour clump, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Lima beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, flour, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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