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Stewed Beans

Stewed beans with butter, herbs, cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Stewed Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the beans in water with butter until tender.

  2. Chop the sweet herbs and parsley finely.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pot, combine the water from boiling the beans with cream and the chopped herbs.

  2. Stew the mixture until tender.

  3. Add the beans and stew for 5 minutes.

  4. Thicken with butter and flour.

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 + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavour of the stewing liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the stewing liquid.
Flour
Thickens the liquid with butter so the sauce coats the beans.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavour to the beans and to the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with butter and flour. Flour mixed with butter must be cooked into the hot liquid so starch granules swell and thicken it evenly. Adding the flour raw or unblended can leave lumps and a floury taste.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, cream, 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.

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