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Genuine Mexican Beans As Prepared in Mexico

Beans cooked with onion and lard, simmered in their own liquid until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Genuine Mexican Beans As Prepared in Mexico

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans in water overnight. If in a hurry, boil them without soaking, but this will increase cooking time by one hour.

  2. Add the onion to the beans and boil gently until they can be mashed between your fingers.

  3. Do not discard the liquid from boiling the beans.

Fry and simmer

  1. In a deep frying pan, heat a large spoonful of fresh lard until very hot.

  2. Using a perforated spoon, gently add the beans (drained of liquid) to the hot lard. Move the pan to the back of the stove to prevent the lard from catching fire.

  3. Once the beans have absorbed the lard, return the pan to the heat and mix the beans and lard until the beans are coated and begin to burst.

  4. Add 1 cup of the reserved liquid and gently crush the beans with a cooking spoon, but do not mash them.

  5. Add the remaining liquid and let it simmer on low heat for about 30 minutes, or until the beans reach your desired consistency.

  6. Do not add salt until the beans are soft. The onion will not be noticeable after cooking, but it adds a characteristic Mexican flavor.

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. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 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

Pink beans
Form the main body of the dish and, once crushed, thicken it into a creamy texture.
Fresh lard
Adds richness and fat, coating the beans and carrying the savoury flavour.
Onion
Adds a characteristic Mexican flavour that remains after cooking, though the onion itself is not noticeable.

The step that matters

Heating the lard before adding the beans. The lard must be very hot so the beans fry and coat quickly rather than steaming. Moving the pan off the heat while adding them prevents the lard from catching fire.

“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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