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Broad Beans

Young broad beans cooked with parsley, butter, eggs, lemon, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Broad Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the young beans with a bunch of parsley and 1 teaspoon of salt until cooked.

  2. Drain the beans.

  3. Place them in a stewpan.

Season and finish

  1. Add pepper, nutmeg, chopped parsley, butter, and winter savory to the beans.

  2. Shake the mixture over the fire for a few minutes.

  3. Mix the beans with the yolks of 4 eggs and the juice of 1 lemon.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Nutmeg + winter savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Parsley + winter savorytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together863 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 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

Young broad beans
Provide the main body of the dish and its tender texture when cooked.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the beans into a creamy coating when mixed in.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth mouthfeel and rich flavour to the beans.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the richness of the yolks and butter.

The step that matters

Mix the beans with the yolks and lemon juice. Egg yolks thicken when warmed but can scramble if they get too hot. Adding them to beans that are still hot, and keeping the heat low, lets them coat the beans smoothly instead of curdling.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper, nutmeg, butter, winter savory, egg, lemon):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, pepper, nutmeg, butter, winter savory, egg, lemon. 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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