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To Boil Windsor Beans

Boiled Windsor beans seasoned with salt, parsley, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Shell and wash the Windsor beans.

Boil and serve

  1. Put them in boiling water with a little salt.

  2. Boil for 15 to 20 minutes until tender.

  3. If no pickled pork or bacon is available, serve with parsley and 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

Windsor beans
The main ingredient; boiling softens their starches and cell walls until the beans turn tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, coating the beans and carrying a rounder, savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Boil until tender, not longer. Boiling softens the starches and cell walls of the beans. Stopping too early leaves them firm and chalky, while boiling too long breaks them down until they turn mushy. Check tenderness near the end of the stated time.

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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