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Green Beans Boiled with Pork

A boiled green bean dish cooked with pork, flour, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and green beans work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 93 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green Beans Boiled with Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Boil the pork for five hours.

  2. In a stewpan, cook the diced pork slowly for 20 minutes.

  3. Add the hot water to the pork.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the flour with a few spoonfuls of cold water and stir into the pork and water.

  2. Cook the mixture slowly for one hour.

Add the beans and serve

  1. Cook the green beans with the pork until tender, about 30 minutes.

  2. Add the green beans and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  3. Taste and add more salt if needed.

  4. Add butter just before serving, if desired.

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. Pork + green beanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together93 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  4. Green beans + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Green beans + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together154 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Pork
Provides rich meaty flavor and savory fat that seasons the broth as it cooks.
Green beans
Become tender as the main vegetable, absorbing flavor from the pork broth.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly body-rich sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour slurry into the pork and water. Flour mixed with cold water disperses without lumps; adding it to hot liquid unmixed causes clumping. Slow cooking for the full hour then fully hydrates the starch so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the green beans

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Green beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, flour, butter. 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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