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Green Bean Pudding

A pudding made from boiled beans, cream, egg yolk, spinach juice, and seasoned with pepper and salt, topped with parsley, butter, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Green Bean Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil and blanch the green beans.

  2. Beat the beans in a mortar with pepper, coarse sea salt, cream, and the egg yolk.

  3. Add a little spinach juice for color.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture in a basin for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Pour parsley and butter over the pudding before serving.

  2. 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.

  1. Beans + spinachtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together365 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  3. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. 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

What each ingredient does

Old beans
Provides the bulk and body of the pudding.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the soft mixture.
Egg yolk
Sets as it heats, helping bind the pudding together.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished pudding.
Spinach juice
Adds green colour to the mixture.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture in a basin for 1 hour. Egg yolk proteins set gently with heat. If the mixture boils too hard or for too long, the egg can curdle and the pudding becomes grainy, dense, or watery.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Cashew nutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cream, egg, spinach, 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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