Skip to main content
Main

French Beans a LA Mattre d’Hotel

A sauté of French beans with butter, parsley, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

French Beans a LA Mattre d’Hotel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Pick and string the beans, cutting each into 3 or 4 strips.

  2. Wash the beans in cold water, drain, and place in a saucepan of boiling water.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil until tender, then transfer to cold water for a few minutes.

  2. Dry the beans with a clean cloth and place in a stewpan with butter, parsley, pepper, salt, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

  3. Heat until hot and serve with croutons.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 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. Nutmeg + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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 and then gently reheated.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky coating that carries the flavour of the herbs and seasoning.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery flavour and balances the richness.
Parsley
Contributes fresh, green aroma and a clean herbal flavour.

The step that matters

Dry the beans thoroughly before adding them to the butter. Water left on the beans dilutes the butter and stops it coating them evenly, so the sauce turns thin and watery instead of clinging to the beans.

Swap the beans

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes