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Haricot Beans with Tomatoes

A dish of boiled haricot beans simmered in a tomato sauce with butter, flour, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Haricot Beans with Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the haricot beans until tender, then strain, reserving ½ cup of the cooking liquid.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and stir in the flour to make a roux.

  2. Gradually add the reserved cooking liquid and the tomatoes, stirring until thickened.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the hot beans with the tomato mixture, season with pepper and salt, and serve hot.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 of the dish and a soft, starchy texture when cooked until tender.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture, forming the base of the sauce with the thickened cooking liquid.
Butter
Provides fat and flavour, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by forming a roux with the melted butter and cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cooking the roux and adding the liquid gradually. Cooking the flour in butter for a short time removes its raw taste, and adding liquid slowly while stirring keeps the sauce smooth rather than lumpy as the starch swells and thickens.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Okrafits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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