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Beans, Boiled French

Boiled French beans cooked with salt, baking soda, and served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Beans, Boiled French

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the heads and tails of the beans and remove the strings by slicing a thin strip on each side.

  2. Divide each bean into 4 or 6 pieces and place them in cold water with a little salt dissolved in it.

Boil and serve

  1. In a saucepan, bring ½ gallon of water to a boil and add the salt and baking soda.

  2. Add the beans to the boiling water and cook uncovered, ensuring they do not get smoked.

  3. Cook until tender, about 10-12 minutes for very young beans or 15-20 minutes for moderate size.

  4. Drain the beans in a colander and serve with plain melted butter.

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. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Form the main body of the dish and become tender when boiled.
Baking soda
Raises the water's pH, helping the beans stay bright green while cooking.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating of fat to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Cook uncovered in fully boiling water. Green vegetables cooked in a rapidly boiling, uncovered pot keep their colour and texture. Covering the pot or adding beans to water that is not boiling can dull the colour and make them soggy, so the beans should go in only once the water is at a full boil.

“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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