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French Beans with Garlic

A sautéed side dish of French beans flavored with garlic, butter, olive oil, lemon, parsley, and shallots.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

French Beans with Garlic

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the beans in slightly salted water until tender.

  2. Drain the beans.

Make the garlic butter

  1. Crush the garlic and mix it with a little fresh butter.

  2. Stir the garlic butter into the drained beans.

Finish and serve

  1. Add chopped parsley, shallots, or green onions, and a little olive oil.

  2. Continue stirring until well combined and the oil forms a paste.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  4. Serve 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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Provide the main body of the dish, cooked until tender.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that flavours the butter coating the beans.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating that carries the garlic flavour.
Olive oil
Adds fat and helps bind the mixture into a paste-like coating.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery, rich flavour.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until well combined and the oil forms a paste. Stirring the butter and oil with the warm beans spreads the fat evenly so each bean is coated; stopping early leaves greasy pools and dry beans.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, garlic, butter, olive, lemon, pepper, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, garlic, butter, olive, lemon, pepper, parsley. 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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