Skip to main content
Main

Aux Fines Herbes

A simple dish of tender French beans tossed with butter, parsley, cress, shallot, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the beans until tender.

  2. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add parsley, cress, shallot, pepper, and nutmeg to the butter.

  3. Pour the mixture over the cooked beans and serve.

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 + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

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

  2. Garden cress + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  4. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Beans + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together147 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Form the main body of the dish, providing the vegetable base for the buttery herb mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the herb flavours, coating the beans with a smooth, glossy finish.
Parsley
Contributes fresh, green aroma and a clean herbal flavour to the butter.
Common garden cress
Adds a sharp, peppery note and fresh aroma that brightens the buttery sauce.
Shallot
Adds a mild onion-like sweetness and aroma when softened in butter.

The step that matters

Cook the beans until tender. Beans cooked too briefly stay tough and squeaky, while overcooking turns them soft and dull in colour. Cooking them just until tender keeps them firm and bright green, so they hold the buttery herb coating well.

Swap the shallot

The recipe marks shallot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, butter, parsley, garden cress, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotthe original
  2. Lettucefits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Mustardfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, butter, parsley, garden cress, pepper, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

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