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Marten As Beans

Beans simmered with onions, sugar, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Marten As Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the beans

  1. Pour boiling salted water over the beans every other day for two weeks.

Make the pickle

  1. Boil the chopped onions and sugar with the beans.

  2. Add spices, black pepper, cloves, and cinnamon to the vinegar.

  3. Pour the hot vinegar mixture over the beans and repeat five or six times.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Beans + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  5. Beans + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together908 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the main bulk and absorb the flavors of the pickling liquid as they soften.
Onions
Add savory aroma and body to the liquid as they cook with the beans.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with a gentle sweetness.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the beans.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot vinegar mixture over the beans. Heat helps the warm, acidic liquid penetrate the beans, and repeating the pour builds up the vinegar and spice flavor throughout them.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sugar, pepper, clove, cinnamon, vinegar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sugar, pepper, clove, cinnamon, vinegar. 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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