Name: Boiled Dried Beans
Ingredients: 1 piece of pickled pork; 2 quarts of water; 1 quart of dried beans, picked and washed

Why it works: Pork and beans are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Boiled Dried Beans

Ingredients

1 piece of pickled pork
2 quarts of water
1 quart of dried beans, picked and washed

Directions

Prepare

Combine the pickled pork and 2 quarts of water in a pot.
Bring 1 quart of dried beans to a boil in another pot, then drain them in a colander.

Cook

Add the drained beans to the pot with the pork and cover with water.
Boil until the beans are soft and serve.

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.

Pork + beanstop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,000 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

Dried beans: Starch that softens during long simmering, giving the dish its body and thickening the liquid.
Pickled pork: Adds savory, salty flavor and fat that enriches the cooking water.

“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.