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Baked Beans

Onions and fat meat eaten at the same meal are liable to disagree; serve the onions at another time or use them only for flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Baked Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick over the beans carefully, wash, and soak them in soft water as directed in the chapter on legumes.

  2. If using fat meat, scald or parboil it first, then add it to the beans after they have cooked for about an hour.

  3. Remove the meat when it is tender if the beans require long cooking.

  4. Once the beans are tender, pour them into a bean pot or round pan.

  5. Cover the top with slices of the fat meat or pour cooking oil over the beans, and add a few whole onions.

  6. Bake for about 1 hour.

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

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

  2. Beans + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together369 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Meat + oniontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,364 recipes

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

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

Swap the onion

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, meat. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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