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Haricot Fricassee

A creamy bean dish with butter, flour, stock, and toasted bread pieces, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Haricot Fricassee

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the haricot beans in cold water for 1.5 to 2 hours, or place them in a covered jar with water in the oven for 12 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Slice the onion thinly and brown it in butter over medium heat.

  2. Sprinkle the wholemeal flour slowly into the pan, cooking for 1–2 minutes without burning.

  3. Gradually pour in the vegetable stock while stirring to prevent lumps.

  4. Boil the mixture for about 5 minutes, then add the haricot beans and let them simmer gently until ready.

Serve

  1. When serving, place sippets around the dish and squeeze lemon juice over the haricots.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

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

  4. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 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

Haricot beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb flavour as they simmer in the sauce.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavour and browns it, adding richness to the base.
Wholemeal flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked briefly with the butter.
Vegetable stock
Forms the liquid of the sauce that the beans simmer in.

The step that matters

Adding the stock. Pouring the stock in gradually while stirring keeps the flour evenly dispersed, so the sauce stays smooth instead of forming lumps.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, lemon, bread. 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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