Name: Broad Beans with White Sauce
Ingredients: broad beans; white sauce (see recipes for turnips, Jerusalem artichokes, and other white vegetables); parsley sauce (optional); herbs (for seasoning)

Why it works: Turnip and jerusalem artichoke share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 74 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Broad Beans with White Sauce

Ingredients

broad beans
white sauce (see recipes for turnips, Jerusalem artichokes, and other white vegetables)
parsley sauce (optional)
herbs (for seasoning)

Directions

Prepare broad beans by removing the outer shell.
Cook the beans until tender.
Serve with a good white sauce or parsley sauce seasoned with herbs.
For a puree, follow the instructions for white 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.

Turnip + jerusalem artichoketop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together74 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,842 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + turniptop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together400 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + jerusalem artichoketop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Jerusalem artichoke + parsleytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together70 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sauce, turnip, jerusalem artichoke):

Capersfits better
Celeryfits better
Tarragonfits about as well
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sauce, turnip, jerusalem artichoke. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.