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To Boil Dried Lima or Other Beans

A simple boiled bean dish seasoned with butter and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Boil Dried Lima or Other Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans overnight.

  2. Soak the beans in fresh water until two hours before dinner.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans steadily in a covered saucepan for two hours.

Finish

  1. Drain the beans and add the butter and salt.

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. 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

Dried lima beans
Provide the main body; their starch softens during long soaking and simmering into a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel, and carries flavor across the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans steadily in a covered saucepan. A steady, gentle boil with a lid keeps the water temperature even and the liquid from evaporating, so the beans cook through evenly. A violent boil can break the skins and leave the beans mushy.

“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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