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Creamed String Beans

Creamed String Beans is a dish of tender string beans coated in a thickened milk and butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Place the string beans in a covered saucepan with water.

  2. Cook until tender.

  3. Drain the beans.

  4. Remove any remaining strings.

  5. Return the beans to the pan.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Add the cold milk and salt.

  2. Mix the flour smoothly with the soft butter to form a paste.

  3. Thicken the mixture with the flour and butter paste until it reaches a thick cream consistency.

  4. Cook until the sauce is thoroughly done.

  5. Add a dash of pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve in a hot covered dish.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  3. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

String beans
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and coated by the sauce.
Cold milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a cream as it cooks.
Soft butter
Blends with the flour into a paste and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the flour and butter paste. Flour must be mixed smoothly into the butter first, then stirred into the milk and cooked fully. Otherwise lumps form and the sauce stays floury-tasting instead of smooth and thick.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, butter, pepper. 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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