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String Beans

Pickled string beans prepared by boiling, brining, and storing like cucumber pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. String and cut the beans as for the table.

  2. Boil water with a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Add a few handfuls of beans. Let them boil once.

  4. Skim the beans into a common crock.

Pickle

  1. Pour cold brine over the beans, similar to cucumber pickles.

  2. Store and care for them like cucumber pickles.

  3. Freshen the beans overnight.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil the beans.

  2. Prepare as usual.

  3. Add a bit of alum while cooking.

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 + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together602 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

Young and tender string beans
Form the main body of the pickle, with a crisp bite when cooked properly.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the cooking water and helps draw out moisture from the beans.
Cold brine
Preserves the beans in a salted liquid, as in cucumber pickling.
Alum
Helps the beans stay firm during cooking and pickling.

“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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