Name: String Beans with Tomatoes
Ingredients: 1 pound string beans; ½ cup butter; 4 large potatoes, cut into squares; 4 large tomatoes, chopped; Salt and pepper to taste; 1 tablespoon flour; 1 cup soup stock, meat gravy, or milk

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

String Beans with Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Cut off both ends of the string beans, remove the strings, and break them into 1-inch pieces.
Boil the beans in salted water until tender.
Drain the beans and add boiling water.

Make the sauce and combine

Add butter, potatoes, tomatoes, salt, and pepper to the beans.
In a skillet, melt 1 tablespoon of butter. Stir in flour.
Thin the mixture with soup stock, meat gravy, or milk.
Add the mixture to the beans and stir well.

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.

Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,713 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beans + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,798 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

String beans: Form the main body of the dish and provide most of its texture.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the dish.
Potatoes: Add starch that softens during cooking and thickens the dish slightly.
Tomatoes: Add moisture and acidity that brightens the vegetables.
Flour: Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth, slightly thick sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in flour. Flour must be cooked briefly in melted butter before liquid is added; otherwise it stays raw-tasting and clumps when thinned.

Swap the tomato

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

Asparagusfits better
Chivefits better
Okrafits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, potato, pepper, flour, meat. 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.