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To Boil Beans

A simple boiled bean dish seasoned with sea salt, parsley, and served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

To Boil Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Do not shell beans until ready to cook.

Cook

  1. Boil a large pot of water and add a handful of coarse sea salt and a bunch of parsley.

  2. Add the beans to the boiling water and keep boiling quickly.

  3. Taste a bean to check for doneness; they should be very tender.

Serve

  1. Drain the beans and garnish with chopped parsley.

  2. Serve with a tureen of melted butter.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

  3. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and mild when boiled.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat that complements the mild flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Checking doneness by tasting. Beans can go from underdone to mushy quickly, so tasting a bean for tenderness, rather than relying on time alone, shows when they are ready to drain.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter. 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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