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To Keep French Beans All the Year

A method for preserving young French beans by salting, storing, and later cooking them with cabbage, butter, flour, pepper, and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and cabbage are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,081 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

To Keep French Beans All the Year

Ingredients

Directions

Preserve the beans

  1. Gather young beans on a fine day.

  2. In a large stone jar, layer salt and beans until full, covering with salt.

  3. Tie a coarse cloth over the jar and place a weight on top to keep out air. Store in a dry cellar.

Prepare and cook

  1. When ready to use, wash beans and soak in soft water for 24 hours, changing water often.

  2. Boil beans with the white heart of a small cabbage without adding salt. Drain and chop the cabbage, then combine with beans in a saucepan.

  3. Add butter rolled in flour, a little pepper, and gravy. Let stew for 10 minutes and serve as a side dish.

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. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  2. Beans + cabbagetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Young french beans
Form the main body of the dish, preserved in salt and then softened for cooking.
Coarse sea salt
Preserves the beans by drawing out moisture and keeping air and spoilage away.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the stew a smooth, rounded texture.
Flour
Thickens the butter and the cooking liquid so the stew becomes less watery.
Good gravy
Adds savoury moisture and flavour to the stewed beans.

The step that matters

Soaking the preserved beans. The beans are packed heavily in salt, so soaking them for a full 24 hours with frequent water changes removes excess salt. Skipping or shortening this leaves the dish too salty.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

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