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Butter Beans with Parsley Sauce

A dish of butter beans simmered in butter and milk, finished with parsley, lemon, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Butter Beans with Parsley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Pick and wash the butter beans, then soak them overnight in boiling water, just covering them.

  2. In the morning, cook the beans gently in the soaking water with a little butter until soft, about 2 hours.

  3. Add water as needed to prevent burning, only enough for absorption.

Make the parsley sauce

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with the wheatmeal smoothed with a little cold milk.

  3. Add the lemon juice, parsley, pepper, and salt to the thickened milk.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and creamy when cooked slowly.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens when heated with flour.
Allinson fine wheatmeal
Thickens the milk into a sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and softens the beans.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the creamy sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Thicken the milk with the wheatmeal. Flour must be smoothed in cold milk before adding, otherwise it clumps. Starch swells when heated, so the sauce thickens evenly only if it is whisked smooth first.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, parsley, lemon, pepper. 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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