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Sour Beans with One Egg

A simple dish of boiled string beans tossed in a butter, flour, vinegar sauce and finished with a lightly beaten egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,733 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sour Beans with One Egg

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Cut string beans into pieces and boil until tender.

  2. Drain the beans thoroughly.

Make the sauce and finish

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour.

  2. Add vinegar, salt, and pepper, then mix in the beans.

  3. Cook together for about 5 minutes.

  4. Beat the egg lightly and stir it in just before serving.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  2. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the flour form a smooth base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and vinegar mixture into a light sauce that coats the beans.
Vinegar
Adds sourness, which gives the dish its tangy character.
Egg
Lightly beaten and stirred in at the end, it adds richness and thickens the sauce slightly.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg. Adding the beaten egg just before serving, rather than boiling it, keeps it from scrambling. Heat gently set the egg proteins, so a hot sauce added to the egg slowly or a long boil can turn it grainy.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, vinegar, pepper, egg. 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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