Skip to main content
Main

Green Beans with Cream

A dish of green beans cooked in salted water and thickened with cream, finished with sour cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Green beans and cream work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry 2-heptanol, which smells bitter, floral. The science ↓

Green Beans with Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and clean the green beans.

  2. Chop the beans into oblique squares.

Cook and thicken

  1. Cook the beans in salted water until soft.

  2. Prepare a thickening and add it to the beans.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, pour in the sour cream.

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. Green beans + creamtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender base when cooked.
Cream thickening
Thickens the cooking liquid so the beans are coated rather than swimming in it.
Sour cream
Adds richness and a tangy flavor, and stays creamy when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Bring the mixture to a boil. Once the thickening is added, it must come to a boil to fully activate and set the starch. Boiling too weakly leaves the sauce thin, while boiling too long can cause the starch to break down and loosen again.

“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.

You might also like

Green PeasGreen Peas229 recipesGreen Pea SoupGreen Pea Soup181 recipesGreen Corn SoupGreen Corn Soup46 recipesGreen Peas SoupGreen Peas Soup35 recipes