Skip to main content
Main

French Beans, & LA pouUHe

A simple boiled French bean dish with butter, flour, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,080 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

French Beans, & LA pouUHe

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Wash the beans in cold water.

  2. Boil 3 pints of water in a saucepan.

  3. Add 1 teaspoon of salt to the boiling water.

  4. Throw in the beans and boil quickly, uncovered, to keep them green.

  5. When done, drain the beans carefully.

Make the butter

  1. In a separate pan, melt 1 oz of butter with 1 teaspoon of flour, stirring for 3 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour 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

French beans
Form the main vegetable and provide the tender, crisp-cooked texture of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor to the finished beans.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter, helping it cling to the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans quickly, uncovered. Boiling briskly in plenty of boiling water cooks the beans fast and helps keep their chlorophyll green. Prolonged cooking lets acids released from the vegetable turn the green colour olive-brown, so drain them as soon as they are done.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Macadamia nutfits better
  3. Cashew nutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

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

More french beans recipes

Boiled 29Pickled 12Preserved 9Plain 4Stewed 4Creamed 3 See all 54 →

You might also like

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