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Sweet Pickled Wax Beans

A sweet pickled dish made from wax beans simmered in a syrup of vinegar, sugar, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 511 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Pickled Wax Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Put the wax beans into a kettle and add boiling salt water to cover them.

  2. Boil the beans until almost tender, then drain the water.

  3. Measure the drained water to determine the amount of vinegar needed.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine 1 pint of vinegar, 1 pound of sugar, and cinnamon pieces.

  2. Boil the mixture to create a syrup.

Combine and can

  1. Add the beans to the syrup.

  2. Heat the mixture thoroughly.

  3. Can the mixture.

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 + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Vinegar + cinnamontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Beans + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Wax beans
The main vegetable; heat softens its cell walls so it absorbs the syrup.
Vinegar
Provides the sour, sharp flavor and acidity that defines the pickle.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sourness of the vinegar.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and spice to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until almost tender. The beans keep softening when they are heated again in the hot syrup. Boiling them until only almost tender leaves enough firmness to hold their shape. Overcooked beans turn mushy once they are added to the syrup and heated thoroughly.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, cinnamon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, cinnamon. 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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