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Lima and Kidney Beans

A simple boiled bean dish served with butter, salt, or creamy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Lima and Kidney Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the beans in enough water to cover them until tender.

Serve or cream

  1. Serve with butter and coarse sea salt.

  2. Or cream the beans.

  3. To cream, mix 1 teaspoon of flour with milk until thick.

  4. Add a little parsley and stir into the beans.

  5. Add 1 cup of milk.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

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

Lima or kidney beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the cooking liquid as they soften.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a creamy sauce that coats the beans.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, adding richness and smoothness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silky mouthfeel when served with the beans.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the milk. Flour must be fully mixed into the milk so it thickens evenly. Its starch swells in liquid and thickens the mixture, so unmixed clumps of flour stay as lumps.

Swap the kidney beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, 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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