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Spanish Beans

A stew of red beans, tomatoes, onions, peppers, rice, and oil, seasoned with sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the red beans overnight and rinse them.

  2. Parboil the beans for 20 minutes, then pour off the water and rinse again.

Cook the stew

  1. Add the strained stewed tomatoes, onions, green peppers, oil, and water to the beans.

  2. Boil until thoroughly cooked, about 1 hour.

  3. One hour before serving, add the washed rice.

  4. Salt to taste and remove the peppers once they are cooked.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Beans + ricetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,017 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Red beans
Form the body of the stew and supply most of its substance and texture.
Stewed tomatoes
Add moisture and acidity that give the stew its tomato base flavor.
Onions
Contribute sweetness and aromatic depth as they soften during long cooking.
Oil
Carries fat-soluble flavors and adds richness to the broth.
Rice
Thickens the stew slightly as its starch releases during the final hour.

The step that matters

Boil until thoroughly cooked. Dried red beans must be fully cooked through, since undercooked beans can be hard and may cause digestive upset. Salt is added only after the peppers are cooked, so check tenderness before finishing the seasoning.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, tomato, pepper, rice. 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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