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To Dress Beans

A simple dish of boiled beans served with chopped parsley and bacon or pickled pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Dress Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the tender beans until cooked.

  2. Chop the parsley and serve it with the beans.

  3. Serve bacon or pickled pork on the side, but do not boil it with the beans.

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

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

  3. Parsley + porktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Tender beans
Boiling softens them until tender, giving the dish its main body.
Parsley
Fresh chopped herb adds a bright, green aroma and light flavour.

The step that matters

Keep the bacon or pickled pork out of the boil. Cured pork released into the cooking water adds salt and fat to the beans unevenly and can toughen its own texture, so it is cooked and served separately.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pork):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork. 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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