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To Pickle French Beans

A method for pickling French beans using salt and vinegar, then storing in jars and simmering with vine leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,347 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

To Pickle French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the beans

  1. Clean the French beans and sprinkle coarse sea salt over them.

  2. Stir the beans frequently until the salt begins to dissolve.

Pickle in jars

  1. Drain the beans the next day and place them in jars.

  2. Cover the beans with boiling vinegar.

  3. Let the jars stand for four days away from heat.

Green the pickles

  1. Put the vinegar and pickles in a stew pan.

  2. Cover the stew pan with vine leaves.

  3. Simmer until the leaves turn yellow.

  4. Replace the leaves with fresh leaves until they turn a fine green color.

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 + vinegartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,347 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
The main vegetable; salting and brining firm its texture for a crisp pickle.
Boiling vinegar
Its acidity preserves the beans and gives the pickle its sharp, tangy flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the beans, firming them and helping prepare them for pickling.

The step that matters

Replacing the vine leaves. Heat and acid dull the green chlorophyll in leaves and beans, turning them yellow-olive. Swapping in fresh leaves restores the bright green colour, so the leaves must be changed once they yellow.

“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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