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Bean Salad

A salad of boiled beans, onions, and seasonings, garnished with olives, eggs, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onions

  1. Peel and slice the onions very finely.

  2. Pour cold water over the onions and press hard to remove the strong taste.

  3. Drain well.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a salad bowl, combine the beans and minced onions.

  2. Add salt, pepper, salad oil, white sugar, and vinegar.

  3. Toss lightly but thoroughly with a fork.

  4. Garnish with olives, sliced hard-boiled eggs, and lettuce leaves.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

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

  2. Beans + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Onion + beanstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  5. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 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

Beans
Form the bulk of the salad and absorb the dressing, giving it body.
Onions
Add sharp flavour and crunch, mellowed by the cold water rinse.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the beans and balances the sugar and oil.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth mouthfeel.
White sugar
Adds a light sweetness that rounds out the vinegar's sharpness.

The step that matters

Pressing the onions after the cold water rinse. Pressing and draining removes the sharp sulfur compounds released when onions are cut. Leftover harshness would carry through the whole salad, so the onions must be drained thoroughly before mixing.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pepper, sugar, vinegar, olive, egg, lettuce):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pepper, sugar, vinegar, olive, egg, lettuce. 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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