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Curried Lima Beans

A quick sautéed dish of lima beans flavored with onion, butter, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 331 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Curried Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped onion and sauté until soft.

  3. Stir in the curry powder and cook for 1 minute.

  4. Add the canned lima beans and stir to combine.

  5. Season with salt to taste and heat through.

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. Onion + lima beanstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together331 recipes

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

  2. Butter + lima beanstop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 recipes

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

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the curry flavour into the beans.
Onion
Softens as it cooks, adding sweetness and savory base flavour.
Curry powder
Provides the spiced aroma that defines the dish; blooming it in fat intensifies it.
Lima beans
Form the body of the dish, absorbing the buttery curried flavour as they heat through.

The step that matters

Cooking the curry powder. Stirring curry powder into fat and cooking it briefly releases its fat-soluble aroma compounds. Adding it to liquid or skipping this step leaves the spice tasting raw and dusty.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lima beans. 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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