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Dried Red Kidney Beans

A dish of boiled dried red kidney beans flavored with butter, flour, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dried Red Kidney Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and soak the beans overnight, changing the water as needed.

  2. Three and a half hours before dinner, drain the beans and place them in a saucepan with 3 pints of boiling water.

Cook

  1. Boil slowly, keeping the beans covered with boiling water.

  2. Ten minutes before dinner, drain most of the water, leaving about 4 tablespoons with the beans.

  3. Mix the butter and flour together, then stir into the beans.

  4. Season with salt and white pepper, and cook for 5 minutes, shaking the pan gently.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Kidney beans + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together186 recipes

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

  3. Butter + white peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Kidney beans + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together147 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + white peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

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

Dried red kidney beans
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft during long soaking and boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the beans as it melts into the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the remaining cooking liquid, giving the beans a lightly bound, creamy coating.

The step that matters

Keeping the beans covered with boiling water. If the beans are exposed to air or the water drops too low, they can toughen and split unevenly. Keeping them submerged in boiling water helps them cook through gently and evenly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Jalapenofits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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