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String Beans

String beans boiled with baking soda, salt, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the ends of the string beans and cut them into small pieces.

  2. Place the beans in a bag as you would for peas.

Cook

  1. Boil water in a pot and add the bag of beans.

  2. Add ¼ teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water.

  3. Boil the beans for three hours.

  4. Just before serving, add coarse sea salt to the water.

Serve

  1. Serve the beans seasoned with butter.

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 + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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; long cooking softens its fibers until the pieces become tender.
Baking soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, which helps break down the beans' cell walls and softens them.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that carries flavor to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Add ¼ teaspoon of baking soda to the boiling water.. Baking soda is strong in small amounts. Too much can make the beans mushy and leave a soapy, bitter taste, so measure it exactly.

“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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