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Cream of Green Flageolet Beans, Leland Style

A creamy soup of green flageolet beans with parsley, onion, carrot, and cream, finished with spinach and fried peas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Cream of Green Flageolet Beans, Leland Style

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Combine the beans and boiling water in a saucepan.

  2. Add the faggot of parsley, onion, carrot, and salt.

  3. Cook over high heat until the beans are tender.

  4. Remove the carrot, onion, and faggot from the saucepan.

  5. Stir in the cream sauce.

  6. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  7. Return the strained soup to the saucepan to keep warm.

  8. Season to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. In a bowl, mix the cream with the egg yolks and butter, stirring well.

  2. Add the mixture to the soup. Stir until combined.

  3. Incorporate spinach to achieve a bright green color.

  4. Serve with fried peas on the side.

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. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Leek + carrottop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Beans + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Green flageolet beans
Provide the main body and starchy texture of the soup once cooked and strained.
Cream sauce
Adds richness and a smooth, thick body to the soup.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the finished soup a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Egg yolks
Thicken the soup and add richness when stirred in with the cream.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded flavor that smooths the finished soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and cream mixture. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the soup is boiling when they are added, they can scramble and turn grainy, so the soup should be hot but not boiling when the mixture goes in.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, parsley, celery, leek, onion, carrot, cream):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, parsley, celery, leek, onion, carrot, cream. 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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