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String Beans with New Potatoes

Boiled string beans and new potatoes cooked with salt pork or bacon, served with the pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 655 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

String Beans with New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the strings from the string beans.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans with the salt pork or bacon until nearly tender.

  2. Pare the new potatoes and add them to the kettle with the beans.

  3. Season with salt and let them boil together until both are tender.

Serve

  1. Serve with the boiled salt pork.

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 + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

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

  2. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
Form the main body of the dish and become tender through long boiling.
Salt pork or bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor to the cooking water, seasoning the beans and potatoes.
New potatoes
Add starchy body, becoming tender and soaking up the seasoned cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until nearly tender before adding the potatoes. Beans take longer to soften than new potatoes; adding them together risks mushy potatoes or undercooked beans. Starting the beans first lets both reach tenderness at the same time.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Peanutfits about as well
  2. Beansthe original
  3. Sesamefits about as well
  4. Soybeanfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, potato. 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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