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Lima Beans

A simple cooked lima bean dish seasoned with coarse sea salt and finished with hot cream and optional parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lima beans and parsley work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 126 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the lima beans in soft water.

  2. Cook the beans in a small amount of water with a little coarse sea salt until tender.

Finish

  1. Dissolve cornstarch in cold water and add it to the beans.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then add a few tablespoons of hot cream and remove from heat.

  3. Flavor with chopped parsley if desired.

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. Lima beans + parsleytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together126 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Lima beans + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together152 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Cream + parsleytop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,392 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Form the main body of the dish as the starchy, tender base.
Cornstarch
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a silkier mouthfeel to the thickened beans.

The step that matters

Adding the cornstarch slurry. Cornstarch must be dissolved in cold water first so it does not clump. Its starch granules then swell when heated, thickening the liquid evenly. Adding it directly to hot liquid causes lumps.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lima beans, cream):

  1. Celeryfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

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

More lima beans recipes

Creamed 13Boiled 8Canned 8Dried 6Stewed 6Baked 3 See all 92 →

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