Name: Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1 piece of pickled pork; 2 quarts of water; 1 quart of dried beans

Why it works: Pork and beans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

1 piece of pickled pork
2 quarts of water
1 quart of dried beans

Directions

Prepare the pork and beans

Place the pickled pork in a pot with 2 quarts of water.
In another pot, add 1 quart of picked and washed dried beans and bring to a boil.
Once the beans boil, drain them in a colander.

Cook the soup

Add the drained beans to the pot with the pork and cover with water.
Boil until the beans are soft.

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.

Pork + beanstop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pickled pork: Adds salty, savory flavor to the broth as it cooks.
Dried beans: Provide the main body of the soup and soften as they simmer, thickening the broth.

“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.