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Wax Beans, -maitre D'hotel

Wax beans simmered with butter and Allemande sauce, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Wax Beans, -maitre D'hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the shelled beans in cold water.

Cook the beans

  1. Boil water in a pot and add the salt and butter.

  2. Add the beans and cook until tender, then drain.

Finish and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beans with the Allemande sauce.

  2. Season and toss until well mixed.

  3. Add the chopped parsley and butter, then serve hot.

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 + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  4. Beans + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Wax beans
Form the main body of the dish and provide its tender-crisp vegetable texture.
Allemande sauce
Adds a rich, creamy coating that carries flavour over the beans.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished beans.

The step that matters

Cook the beans until tender, then drain. Beans cooked too long turn soft and mushy, while undercooked beans stay fibrous. Draining well keeps excess water from thinning the Allemande sauce when the two are combined.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, parsley):

  1. Chickpeafits about as well
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Beansthe original
  4. Cashew nutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, parsley. 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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