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Green Bean Soup

A soup made with garden or kidney beans, vegetable broth, Graham flour or oatmeal, spinach, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,025 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Green Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the beans until tender, then strain them through a colander.

  2. Add the vegetable broth to the beans.

  3. Dredge in the Graham flour or oatmeal and stir until it boils.

  4. Add the chopped spinach and parsley, and scald until cooked.

  5. Serve hot.

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. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Flour + spinachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Kidney beans + spinachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Kidney beans + parsleytop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together148 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the body of the soup and provide most of its substance.
Graham flour or oatmeal
Thickens the broth as it heats, giving the soup more body.
Spinach
Adds soft texture and a mild, earthy flavor once scalded.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and a light green flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour or oatmeal. Flour or oatmeal can clump if dropped in without stirring. Stirring while the liquid heats helps the starch disperse and thicken evenly as it boils.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, spinach, parsley):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, spinach, parsley. 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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