Skip to main content
Main

Green Beans, Plain

Plain green beans boiled and sautéed with butter, water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Green beans and butter work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 154 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Green Beans, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. String the beans if necessary and cut them into 2-inch lengths.

  2. Blanch the beans as directed.

Cook and serve

  1. Drain the beans and place them in a saucepan with water, salt, and butter.

  2. Cook for 10 minutes over high heat, stirring occasionally.

  3. If the beans are not tender, cook for up to 15 minutes, but do not overcook.

  4. Serve very 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. Green beans + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans
The main vegetable; cooking softens its fibers into a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the beans a smooth, rounded flavor.

The step that matters

Avoid overcooking the beans. Prolonged heat breaks down the green chlorophyll and softens the cell walls, so overcooked beans turn dull olive-drab and mushy. Check tenderness before adding the extra cooking time.

“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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Pea SoupGreen Pea Soup181 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipes