Name: A Green Bean Pudding
Ingredients: old beans; pepper; coarse sea salt; cream; 1 egg yolk; spinach juice (optional); parsley; butter; bacon (for serving)

Why it works: Beans and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 365 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

A Green Bean Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and blanch the old beans.
Beat the beans in a mortar with a little pepper, coarse sea salt, cream, and the egg yolk.
Add spinach juice for color if desired.
Boil the mixture in a basin for one hour.
Pour parsley and melted butter 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Beans + spinachtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together365 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,025 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,400 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,376 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Swap the spinach

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

Spinachthe original
Chivefits about as well
Asparagusfits about as well
Potatofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pepper, cream, egg, parsley, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.