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To Boil Windsor Beans

Boiled young Windsor beans seasoned with salt, butter, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

To Boil Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell the beans just before cooking.

  2. Wash the beans and add 1 teaspoon of salt to boiling water.

Cook

  1. Add the beans to the boiling water and cook for 20 to 30 minutes until tender.

  2. Drain the beans in a colander and serve immediately.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter or a mixture of butter 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. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young windsor beans
Form the main body of the dish, supplying starch and a tender, filling texture when boiled.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the beans with a smooth, savoury flavour.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma that brightens the buttery flavour.

The step that matters

Cook until tender, no longer. Beans cook within a set window; the starch softens as they heat, and past that point the skins split and the texture turns mushy. Check tenderness near the low end of the time range.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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