Skip to main content
Main

To Boil French Beans

A simple boiled French bean dish seasoned with salt and served with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Boil French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the stalks and string the beans.

  2. If the beans are not very young, cut them into quarters or thin slices.

  3. Place the beans in water as you finish cutting them.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the beans in salted water for 30 minutes.

  2. If the beans are old, boil them longer.

  3. Serve with melted butter in a sauce-tureen.

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

French beans
The main vegetable, which softens and becomes tender as it boils.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded flavour to the beans when melted over them.

The step that matters

Judging the boiling time. Older beans have tougher fibres, so they need longer boiling to become tender. Checking for tenderness rather than relying only on the 30 minutes prevents fibrous beans or overcooked, mushy ones.

“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.

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes