Skip to main content
Dessert

To Dress French Beans

A dish of boiled French beans tossed in a sauce of egg yolks, butter, lemon, parsley, and seasonings.

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

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

To Dress French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Trim the French beans.

  2. Boil them in salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the beans thoroughly.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, heat a little sauce tournee.

  2. Thicken the sauce with the beaten yolks of 2 eggs, chopped parsley, ¼ cup butter, pepper, salt, and the juice of 1 lemon, stirring until hot.

Combine and serve

  1. Place the beans in a stew pan.

  2. Add ¼ cup butter, pepper, salt, and the juice of ½ lemon.

  3. Heat while shaking the pan frequently.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Form the main body of the dish, cooked until tender.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy texture to the sauce and beans.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce.
Sauce tournee
Provides the base sauce that the egg yolks and butter thicken and enrich.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the egg yolks. Egg yolks set when heated, but if the sauce gets too hot or is stirred too little, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy. Stir constantly over gentle heat until the sauce just thickens.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, egg, parsley, butter, pepper, lemon. 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.

More french beans recipes

Boiled 29Pickled 12Preserved 9Plain 4Stewed 4Creamed 3 See all 54 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes