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Beans and Tomatoes

A simple dish of cooked haricot beans simmered in a tomato sauce thickened with flour and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beans and Tomatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Strain the water from the beans and thicken it with flour and water.

  2. Add the tomato sauce and let it boil.

  3. Put in the beans and serve as soon as they are 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. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Flour + beanstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the bean cooking water into a sauce.
Haricot beans
Provide the main body and bulk of the dish.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and savoury flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Put in the beans and serve as soon as they are hot.. Beans that boil for long in a thickened sauce can break apart and turn mushy. Adding them last and serving once heated keeps them whole and tender.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, beans, sauce):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Welsh onionfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, beans, sauce. 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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