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French Beans, a LA Poulette

A simple boiled French bean dish seasoned with salt and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

French Beans, a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose young and tender French beans.

  2. Wash the beans in cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. In a saucepan, bring 3 pints of water to a boil.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of salt to the boiling water.

  3. Throw in the beans and boil uncovered to keep them green.

  4. Add butter to taste before serving.

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

French beans
The main vegetable, providing the tender-crisp texture and bulk of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat for richness, a smooth mouthfeel and flavor to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans uncovered. Boiling with the lid off lets volatile acids escape, so the green chlorophyll stays bright. A covered pot traps these acids, which turn the beans dull olive-green.

“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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