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To Dress Windsor Beans

A seasoned bean dish with butter, flour, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Shell the Windsor beans and rinse them in cold water.

  2. Boil the beans in salted water until tender.

  3. Blanch the beans, then place them in a saucepan.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Add a little soup thickened with butter and flour, along with pepper and salt.

  2. Let the beans stew until tender and the sauce thickens.

  3. Serve the beans, or simply season with pepper and salt, and pour melted parsley butter over them.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

  4. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and flavour, and helps give it a smooth, rich body.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the soup-based sauce as it stews, giving the beans a coating texture.
Windsor beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft as they are boiled and stewed.

The step that matters

Letting the beans stew until the sauce thickens. Flour thickens only when it is heated long enough in liquid to gelatinise its starch. Stewing too briefly leaves the sauce thin and floury-tasting, while heating too hard can scorch the butter and flour on the base of the pan.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Black-eyed peafits better
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, parsley. 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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