Skip to main content
Main

White Beans in Cream

Creamed white beans are cooked beans topped with a butter, flour, and milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Beans in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Look over and wash the dry beans.

  2. Soak the beans in cold water to cover for several hours or overnight.

Cook the beans

  1. Cook the beans in the soaking water, adding enough boiling water to cover them.

  2. Add the salt and sugar for each pint of beans.

  3. Cover the pot and cook until the beans are soft but not dark.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Make a white sauce by melting the butter, adding flour, and whisking in the milk until smooth.

  2. Season the sauce to taste and pour it over the cooked beans.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Dry white beans
Form the bulk of the dish and, once cooked, give it a soft, tender texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Enriches the white sauce with fat and adds rich flavor.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and milk into a white sauce.
Sugar
Adds a touch of sweetness that balances the savory beans.

The step that matters

Cover the pot and cook until the beans are soft but not dark. Beans cooked too long or at too high a heat can darken and lose their delicate color, while undercooked beans stay firm because their starch has not fully gelatinized. Watching the color and texture together helps you hit the point where they are tender and still pale.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, butter, flour. 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.

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes