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Delicate Succotash

A dish of boiled lima beans and corn, finished with cream and seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lima beans and corn work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Delicate Succotash

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the Lima beans in water for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the beans and add more boiling water.

  3. When the beans are nearly done, add the scraped corn and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, then stir in the thick cream.

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 + corntop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lima beans + peppertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

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

  4. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

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

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lima beans
Provide the starchy, firm body that makes up most of the dish.
Corn
Adds sweetness and a tender texture that balances the beans.
Thick cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the mixture a smooth, velvety body.

The step that matters

Adding the corn near the end of the beans' cooking. Corn is tender and cooks quickly, so adding it too early over-softens it and turns it mushy. Adding it once the beans are nearly done keeps the corn sweet and intact while the beans finish softening.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, cream, pepper):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Lima beansthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, cream, 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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