Name: To Boil French Beans and Scarlet Runners
Ingredients: 2 lb. beans; 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt; 2 oz. butter; Boiling water

Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil French Beans and Scarlet Runners

Ingredients

2 lb. beans
1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
2 oz. butter
Boiling water

Directions

Prepare the beans

Cut off the tops and tails of the beans.
Remove the strings from the pods.
Slice the pods into thin pieces at a slant.
Soak the sliced pods in cold water for a few minutes.
Strain the beans.

Cook and serve

Place the beans in boiling water with salt.
Boil uncovered for about 30 minutes or until soft.
Strain the beans through a colander.
Serve the beans in a hot vegetable dish with butter.

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.

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

Beans: Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender through prolonged boiling.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, coating the cooked beans for flavour and mouthfeel.

“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.