Skip to main content
Main

Fat Pork or Bacon and Haricot Beans

A bean dish cooked with bacon or pork, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Fat Pork or Bacon and Haricot Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the haricot beans in cold water for 10 to 12 hours.

  2. Boil the beans with a little coarse sea salt until tender.

  3. Place the cooked beans in a baking dish.

Cook the meat

  1. Place the bacon or pork on a tripod and bake for 1 hour.

  2. Alternatively, roast the meat and place the beans in the dripping pan.

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 + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Provide the bulk and creamy texture as their starch softens during cooking.
Bacon or pork
Adds fat and savory flavor, and its drippings moisten and flavor the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender. Dried beans contain starch that only softens fully with long, thorough cooking. Beans removed too early stay firm and chalky, and they will not turn creamy later in the oven.

“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.

You might also like

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes