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Beans, Haricot

Beans, Haricot is a dish of white haricot beans cooked with butter, parsley, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Beans, Haricot

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans in cold water for 1-2 hours if very dry.

  2. Boil the beans in salted water until tender, about 2-2½ hours.

  3. Drain the beans well.

Dress and serve

  1. In a stewpan, add the butter, minced parsley, pepper, and salt to the beans.

  2. Gently shake the stewpan to mix the ingredients without breaking the beans.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice and serve very hot.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. 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

White haricot beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and creamy when boiled until soft.
Fresh butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the beans and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender. Dried haricot beans need a long, gentle simmer in salted water to soften fully; stopping early leaves them firm and starchy, while a hard boil can split the skins and break them apart.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, 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.

More white haricot beans recipes

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