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Boiled French Beans

A boiled green bean dish seasoned with salt and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Boiled French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break off the tops and bottoms of the beans, string both sides, and pare the edges neatly.

  2. Wash the beans well in cold water and drain.

  3. If the beans are too large, cut them lengthwise in halves before cooking.

Cook and cool

  1. Place the beans in boiling salted water and cook for 25 minutes.

  2. Drain the beans again and return them to cold water to cool thoroughly.

  3. Lift the beans out and dry them.

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 + 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 tender beans
Provide the main body of the dish, cooked until tender while keeping their fresh green texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and gives the cooked beans a smooth finish.

The step that matters

Cool the beans thoroughly in cold water. Plunging the beans into cold water after boiling stops the cooking immediately, keeping them bright green and preventing them from turning soft and dull.

“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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