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Dressed French Beans

A side dish of French beans sautéed with butter, velouté sauce, lemon, glaze, and seasonings, garnished with fried bread and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Dressed French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Wash and string the beans, then cut them into strips.

  2. Cook the beans in boiling salted water until tender, about 15 minutes, then drain thoroughly.

Dress and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a pan, add the beans, veloute sauce, glaze, and seasonings, and heat thoroughly.

  2. Transfer to a vegetable dish and garnish with pieces of fried bread and chopped parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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 body of the dish and provide its fresh, tender texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy coating that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Veloute sauce
Provides a creamy, savoury coating that binds the beans together.

The step that matters

Cook the beans until tender, then drain thoroughly. Beans cooked too long lose colour and bite, while cooking too briefly leaves them tough. Draining well keeps excess water from thinning the butter and sauce when they are combined.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sauce, lemon, pepper, bread, parsley):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Beansthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Pistachiofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sauce, lemon, pepper, bread, parsley. 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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