Name: Steak with Haricot Beans— a Luncheon Dish
Ingredients: ½ pound haricot beans; 1½ cups cold water; 2 tablespoons coarse sea salt; 2 pounds steak; pepper to taste; 6-8 large tomatoes, peeled and sliced; dry toast or crisp rusks for serving

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Steak with Haricot Beans— a Luncheon Dish

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak the beans overnight in cold water.
Strain the beans and wash them in several waters.
Place the beans in a deep earthenware pan with cold water and salt.

Cook

Cover the pan and bring to a boil in the oven.
Add the steak, leaving on all the fat, and season with pepper.
Cover again and cook slowly for about 2 hours.
Half an hour before serving, add the sliced tomatoes.

Serve

Serve hot with dry toast or crisp rusks.

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.

Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,713 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans: Form the bulk of the dish and soften into a tender base during slow cooking.
Steak: Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, slow cooking in liquid.
Tomatoes: Add acidity and juiciness, brightening the rich beans and meat.

The step that matters

Cook slowly with the pan covered. Gentle, covered cooking keeps the liquid from evaporating and lets tough steak and dried beans become tender without drying out or toughening.

Swap the beans

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

Beansthe original
Black-eyed peafits about as well
Chickpeafits less well
Lentilsfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, tomato. 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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Steak with Haricot Beans— a Luncheon Dish