Skip to main content
Main

Beans, Boiled French

Boiled French beans cooked in salted water with baking soda, served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Beans, Boiled French

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the heads and tails of the beans and remove the strings by slicing a thin strip on each side.

  2. Divide each bean into 4 or 6 pieces, cutting them lengthwise at a slant, and place them in cold water with a little salt dissolved in it.

Cook and serve

  1. In a saucepan, bring the water to a boil and add the salt and baking soda.

  2. Add the beans to the boiling water and cook quickly with the lid uncovered, ensuring they do not get smoked.

  3. When the beans sink to the bottom, they are tender; drain them in a colander.

  4. Serve the beans with plain melted 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.

  1. 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

Fresh french beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when briefly boiled.
Plain melted butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the cooked beans a smooth, savoury coating.
Baking soda
Raises the water's alkalinity, which helps the beans keep a bright green colour.

The step that matters

Cook quickly in boiling water with the lid uncovered. Beans need a fast, vigorous boil to cook evenly while keeping their colour. Overcooking softens their texture and dulls the green, so test for tenderness as they sink.

“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

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes