Name: Flaked Bean Croquettes
Ingredients: 3 cups flaked beans; ¾ cup boiling water; ½ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon paprika; 1 beaten egg; rice flakes for coating; oil for frying

Why it works: Beans and rice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,017 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Flaked Bean Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

Combine flaked beans, boiling water, salt, paprika, and beaten egg in a bowl, and mix until well combined.
Shape the mixture into small rolls.

Coat and fry

Coat each roll in rice flakes.
Dip the coated rolls in beaten egg.
Coat again in rice flakes.
Heat oil in a pan and fry the croquettes until golden brown.

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 + ricetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,017 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Egg + ricetop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,350 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).
Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,030 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

Flaked beans: Form the bulk of the croquette and hold its shape when shaped into rolls.
Beaten egg: Binds the mixture together and helps the rice flake coating stick.
Rice flakes: Form a crisp outer coating that browns during frying.