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Windsor Beans

A bean stew with butter, parsley, scallions, flour, sugar, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Half cook the beans in water with a little salt.

Make the dish

  1. In a stew-pan, combine the beans with butter, parsley, scallions, and savoury.

  2. Add flour and sugar, then dilute with vegetable broth or clear soup.

  3. When cooked, mix in yolks of eggs moistened with milk and serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the beans and sauce.
Egg yolks
Enriches and thickens the sauce when mixed in at the end.
Milk
Moistens the egg yolks so they blend smoothly into the dish.

The step that matters

Mixing in the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated, so adding them to a liquid that is too hot can scramble them. Moistening them with milk first and mixing them in off the heat helps them blend smoothly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, parsley, egg, milk):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, parsley, egg, milk. 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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