Name: Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1 pint dried beans; 1 pound salt pork; water

Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bean Soup

Ingredients

1 pint dried beans
1 pound salt pork
water

Directions

Prepare

Soak the beans overnight.

Cook

In the morning, boil the beans in fresh water for 2 hours.
In another pot, boil the salt pork in enough water to make soup.
Once the pork is cooked, add the beans to the pot and boil together for 30 minutes.
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.

Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 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

Dried beans: Form the body of the soup and thicken it as they soften during long simmering.
Salt pork: Adds savory fat and flavor to the broth as it cooks.

“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.