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Fried String Beans

Fried string beans cooked in butter or lard with salt and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fried String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and string the beans.

Cook

  1. In a deep frying pan, melt the butter or lard.

  2. Add the beans and salt, cover, and cook for 1 hour, stirring frequently to prevent burning.

  3. When almost done, add the water and cook for an additional 15 minutes.

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 + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
Form the bulk of the dish and soften into tender pieces during long, covered cooking.
Butter or lard
Adds fat for frying and richness, and helps the beans brown lightly in the pan.

The step that matters

Stirring during the covered cook. The beans cook for a full hour with little free liquid, so sugars and starch can scorch on the pan bottom. Frequent stirring spreads heat and keeps the beans from sticking and burning.

“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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