Name: Chicken and Bean Soup
Ingredients: 1 fat hen; 1 quart beans, soaked overnight; butter, to taste; coarse sea salt, to taste; boiling water, as needed

Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken and Bean Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the fat hen until it is ready to fall apart.
Parboil the soaked beans in rainwater until soft.
Drain the beans and add them to the chicken.
Stew slowly for 30 minutes.
Add butter and coarse sea salt to taste.
Fill up with boiling water to reach the desired quantity.

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.

Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,799 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

Fat hen: Its meat becomes tender and flavours the broth as it stews until it falls apart.
Beans: They soften during parboiling and stewing, becoming tender and thickening the soup.

“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.