Name: Lima Beans
Ingredients: Fresh lima beans; Salt; Butter

Why it works: Lima beans and butter work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Ingredients

Fresh lima beans
Salt
Butter

Directions

Shell the fresh lima beans.
Boil them in a full kettle of water with a little salt until tender.
Drain the beans and place bits of butter over them.

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.

Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together414 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh lima beans: Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft when boiled.
Butter: Adds richness and moisture, melting over the warm beans.

“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.