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Green Bean Budding

A creamy green bean dish with cream, egg yolks, and optional spinach, boiled until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Green beans and egg work together. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and 48 recipes mention both. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

The recipe

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the green beans until tender.

  2. Peel and mash the beans until smooth, adding pepper and salt.

Make the creamed mixture

  1. Mix in the cream and beaten egg yolks.

  2. Boil the mixture in a basin for one hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with parsley sauce.

  2. For color, add boiled and chopped spinach before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Green beans + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Pepper + spinachtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Green beans + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10 recipes

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

  4. Green beans + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together369 recipes

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

  5. Cream + spinachtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together1,129 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans
Provide the main bulk and body once cooked and mashed into a smooth base.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the mash a richer, softer texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help it thicken and set when heated.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture in a basin for one hour. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can curdle or turn grainy if they get too hot or boil hard for a long time. Keep the heat gentle and steady so the mixture stays smooth and creamy.

Flavor stand-ins for the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (green beans, cream, egg, pepper):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Asparagusabout as good a flavor fit
  3. Capsicumabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Spinachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against green beans, cream, egg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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