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With French Dressing

A side dish of boiled string beans tossed with a vinaigrette of vinegar, olive oil, salt, pepper, and optional onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,470 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

With French Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and cool

  1. Boil the string beans whole until tender.

  2. Cool the beans completely.

Dress and chill

  1. Pour the French dressing over the beans.

  2. Refrigerate until ready to serve.

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 + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,470 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  3. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  5. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and then dressed.
Olive oil
Adds fat that carries flavor and coats the beans.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing against the beans.

The step that matters

Cool the beans completely. Warm beans keep softening and can turn limp, so they should be fully cooled before the oil and vinegar dressing goes on.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, vinegar, olive, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, vinegar, olive, 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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