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Au Fines Herbes

Green beans sautéed with butter, parsley, cress, shallot, pepper, and nutmeg.

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

Au Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cut the beans into 1.5‑inch lengths.

  2. Boil the beans until tender.

Make the herb butter

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter.

  2. Add parsley, cress, shallot (if using), pepper, and nutmeg to the butter.

Serve

  1. 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

Young french beans
Provide the main body of the dish and become tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, carrying the herb flavours over the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender. Beans cooked too briefly stay tough and fibrous, while overcooking makes them soft and dull in colour. Testing a piece for tenderness helps hit the point where they are cooked through but still hold their shape.

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.

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