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Butter Beans with Parsley Sauce

A bean dish simmered with butter, milk, flour, lemon, parsley, pepper, and sea 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.

  2. Soak them overnight in boiling water, just covering them.

Cook the beans

  1. Cook the beans gently in the soaking water with a little butter until soft, about 2 hours.

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

Make the parsley sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the milk.

  2. Thicken the milk with wholemeal flour.

  3. Smooth the mixture with a little cold milk.

  4. Stir in the lemon juice.

  5. Stir in the parsley.

  6. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 tender after long gentle cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the beans as they cook.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens when heated with flour.
Wholemeal flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the creamy sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Add water as needed to prevent burning. Beans cooked gently for about 2 hours can scorch on the base of the pan if the liquid runs low. Adding only enough water to replace what is absorbed keeps them moist without making them watery.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, flour, 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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