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Beans, Haricot, Boiled.

A boiled bean dish cooked slowly with oatmeal, sugar, and fat, finished without salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,587 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Beans, Haricot, Boiled.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the beans in 2 quarts of cold water with 2 ounces of oatmeal for several hours.

  2. Drain and rinse the beans thoroughly.

Cook

  1. Place the beans in a pot with fresh cold water or stock.

  2. Add a pinch of sugar and a morsel of unsalted fat.

  3. Cook the beans slowly and continuously until tender, avoiding adding salt until the end.

  4. Allow the water to evaporate towards the end of cooking to retain nutrients.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the body of the dish; they soften slowly as their starch gelatinises during long simmering.
Oatmeal
Soaked with the beans, it is listed in the record as part of the soaking step.
Sugar
Adds a small amount of sweetness that balances the savoury beans.

The step that matters

Cook the beans slowly until tender. Beans cooked too hard or too fast can break apart or stay firm inside. Gentle, continuous simmering lets the starch soften evenly. Salt added too early can toughen the skins, so it is held back until the end.

“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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