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Best Pork and Beans

A stew of white beans and sweet salt pork, served with pickles and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and horseradish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Best Pork and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Pick over the beans and soak them overnight.

  2. Boil the beans, discarding the soaking water just before boiling.

Cook the pork and beans

  1. Cover the beans with cold water, add the pork, and boil until the beans are tender.

  2. Once done, the water should be absorbed.

  3. Transfer the beans to one pan and the pork to another.

  4. Score the pork through the skin before browning.

Serve

  1. Before serving, place the pork in the center of the beans.

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 + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together78 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pork + horseradishtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together190 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Small white beans
Starchy body that becomes tender and creamy, forming the bulk of the dish.
Sweet salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons the beans as they cook.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender. Dried beans need thorough cooking to soften their starches and become digestible. Stopping early leaves them firm, while the absorbed cooking water is what concentrates flavor in the final beans.

Swap the horseradish

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Horseradishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork. 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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