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Beans and Bacon

Beans and bacon cooked together with salt, parsley, and served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Beans and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the beans and bacon separately, adding salt and parsley to the water.

  2. Once the beans are tender, drain them in a colander.

Brown and serve

  1. Skim the bacon and sprinkle some breadcrumbs on top.

  2. If available, heat an iron until red hot and hold it over the bacon to brown it; otherwise, place it before the fire.

  3. Arrange the beans on a dish with the bacon on top.

  4. Serve with parsley and butter in a separate bowl.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. 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

Beans
Provide the bulk and soft, starchy body of the dish.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour, and browns when exposed to direct heat.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until fully tender. Beans must be fully softened before draining. Undercooked beans stay firm and starchy in the centre, so they taste hard and absorb less of the seasoned cooking water.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter. 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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