Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓
Beans, Broad, Boiled
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Shell and wash the beans.
Boil and serve
Boil the beans in salted water.
Young beans will take about 20 minutes; older beans will take about 30 minutes.
When done, the skins will look wrinkled and the inner bean will slip out easily.
Drain in a colander and serve hot with a lump of butter and a pinch of salt.
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.
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Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Broad beans
- Provide the main body of the dish, with a tender texture once boiled.
- Butter
- Adds richness and a smooth fat coating to the hot beans.
The step that matters
Judging when the beans are done. Boiling past doneness makes beans mushy and dull in colour, while undercooking leaves them starchy and firm. Wrinkled skins and an easily slipping inner bean show the starch has softened.
“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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