Name: Bean and Potato Soup
Ingredients: 1 cup beans; 2 medium potatoes; water; salt to taste

Why it works: Beans and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 655 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Bean and Potato Soup

Ingredients

1 cup beans
2 medium potatoes
water
salt to taste

Directions

Prepare

Soak the beans overnight in water.
Drain and place beans in a pot with fresh water.

Cook and serve

Add diced potatoes and bring to a boil.
Reduce heat and simmer until beans are tender.
Season with salt before serving.

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 + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans: Form the body of the soup and thicken it as their starch softens during simmering.
Potatoes: Add starch that softens into the broth and gives the soup a creamier body.

“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.