Name: Haricot Bean Soup
Ingredients: 2 quarts of stock; 1 pint of haricot beans; pepper to taste; salt to taste

Why it works: Beans and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,733 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Haricot Bean Soup

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

2 quarts of stock
1 pint of haricot beans
pepper to taste
salt to taste

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak the beans overnight in cold water.
Drain the beans and boil them in cold, slightly salted water until tender, about 1.5 hours.
Press the beans through a sieve, leaving out the husks.

Make the soup

Add the pressed beans to warm stock.
Season with pepper and salt, then boil once more.
Serve with fried bread cut into small dice.

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 + 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: Provide the main body and thickening once pressed through a sieve.
Stock: Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.

“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.