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To Warm Up Shelled Beans

A baked dish of shelled beans mixed with mashed potatoes, egg, and oil, formed into cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 655 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

To Warm Up Shelled Beans

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pour off all the milk from the shelled beans and sift through a colander.

  2. Mix the beans with an equal quantity of cold mashed potatoes.

  3. Add 1 well-beaten egg and mix well.

  4. Form the mixture into small cakes using your hands.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the cakes on well-oiled baking sheets.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until golden brown.

  3. Add thick nut cream if desired.

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 + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Beans + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Shelled beans
Form the bulk of the cakes and provide the main body of the dish.
Cold mashed potatoes
Add starch and softness, helping the bean mixture hold together as cakes.
Egg
Binds the mixture so the cakes keep their shape while baking.

The step that matters

Forming the cakes. If the mixture is too wet from the beans or potatoes, the cakes will spread and slump instead of holding shape. Draining the beans well and handling the mixture gently helps it set firm in the oven.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, egg, cream):

  1. Peanutfits about as well
  2. Almondfits about as well
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, egg, cream. 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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