Name: A Green-bean Pudding
Ingredients: 2 cups old green beans; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ½ cup cream; 1 egg yolk; 1 tablespoon spinach juice (optional); 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ cup parsley; bacon (for serving)

Why it works: Green beans and egg work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and 48 recipes mention both. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the pudding

Boil and blanch the green beans.
Beat the beans in a mortar with pepper, salt, cream, and egg yolk.
Add spinach juice for color if desired.
Pour the mixture into a basin.

Cook and serve

Boil for 1 hour.
Melt butter and mix with parsley.
Pour the mixture over the pudding before serving.
Serve with bacon.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Green beans + eggtop 23% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together48 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together34,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cream + buttertop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together41,494 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pepper + spinachtop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,025 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Old green beans: Provide the main body and flavor of the pudding.
Egg yolk: Binds the beaten beans and cream so the pudding sets firm when cooked.
Cream: Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a smooth, tender texture.
Butter: Adds fat and richness to the parsley topping.

Flavor stand-ins for the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (green beans, pepper, cream, egg, butter, parsley):

Potatobetter flavor fit
Asparagusabout as good a flavor fit
Carrotabout as good a flavor fit
Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against green beans, pepper, cream, egg, butter, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.