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To Dress Beans

A simple boiled bean dish seasoned with parsley and served with bacon or pickled pork.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

To Dress Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the beans until tender with the parsley.

  2. Chop the parsley.

  3. Serve the chopped parsley with the beans.

  4. Serve bacon or pickled pork alongside, but do not boil it with the beans.

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 + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Beans + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + porktop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,804 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Beans
Form the main body of the dish; their starch softens and thickens the cooking liquid as they cook.
Parsley
Adds fresh, herbal aroma and a bright flavour that cooking would dull.
Bacon or pickled pork
Adds salty, savoury flavour and fat, which is why it is served alongside rather than boiled in.

The step that matters

Keep the bacon or pickled pork out of the pot. Cured meat boiled with beans releases salt and fat into the liquid, making the beans overly salty and greasy and toughening the meat. Serving it alongside keeps both the beans and the meat's texture and flavour balanced.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pork. 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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