Skip to main content
Main

Sour Beans

A sweet and sour dish made from canned string beans simmered with sugar, cinnamon, vinegar, and optional pickled fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Sour Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat fat in a skillet over medium heat.

  2. Add flour and brown slightly.

  3. Stir in brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, and vinegar to taste.

  4. Add the canned string beans and simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally to prevent burning.

  5. For extra flavor, add juice from pickled peaches or pears 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. Beans + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together511 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + peachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Beans + peachtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 recipes

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

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

Flour
Browned with the fat, it thickens the liquid into a light sauce.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and depth that balances the vinegar's sharpness.
Vinegar
Provides the sour note that defines the dish.
Canned string beans
The main vegetable, simmered until they absorb the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred and browned only slightly; if it scorches, it turns bitter and dark, and the sauce loses its clean flavor. Stirring keeps it even.

Swap the peach

The recipe marks peach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, flour, sugar, cinnamon, vinegar):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Peachthe original

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

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes