Name: French or Scarlet Beans
Ingredients: French or scarlet beans; coarse sea salt; water; butter

Why it works: Scarlet bean and butter work together. They rank in the top 75% of all ingredient pairs. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

French or Scarlet Beans

Ingredients

French or scarlet beans
coarse sea salt
water
butter

Directions

Prepare

Trim the ends of the beans.
String the beans.
Cut the beans in half or across.
Soak the beans in saltwater as you would with other vegetables.

Cook and serve

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.
Add the beans to the boiling water and cook until tender.
Drain the beans.
Serve the beans with melted butter in a sauce tureen.

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.

Scarlet bean + buttertop 75% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together0 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

French or scarlet beans: The main vegetable; they are cooked until tender to be eaten whole or in pieces.
Butter: Melted and served over the beans, adding richness and moisture to the finished dish.

“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.