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To Stew French Beans

Stewed French beans simmered in brown gravy with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,733 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Stew French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the beans in salted water for 15 to 20 minutes.

  2. Drain the beans using a colander.

Stew and serve

  1. In a stewpan, heat the brown gravy, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add the drained beans to the hot gravy and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Serve the beans in the gravy with venison cutlets or any other meat.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Form the body of the dish and become tender as they cook in the gravy.
Brown gravy
Supplies moisture and savoury flavour that the beans take up while simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer the drained beans gently in the gravy. A gentle simmer lets the beans absorb the gravy's flavour and stay intact, while a hard boil would break them down and make them mushy.

“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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