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Yellow Wax Beans

A bean dish cooked with butter, sweet cream, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Yellow Wax Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the beans

  1. Break yellow wax beans into small pieces.

  2. Cook in salted water until tender.

  3. Add plenty of butter and cook until the water no longer covers the beans.

Finish with cream

  1. Stir in ½ cup of sweet cream and a little flour.

  2. Pour in and boil.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

  5. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

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

Yellow wax beans
Forms the main body of the dish and supplies its flavor and texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, glossy mouthfeel to the beans.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and body, and thickens slightly as it reduces during boiling.
Flour
Thickens the liquid as its starch swells when heated.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the cream before boiling. Flour added to hot liquid can clump, leaving lumps. Mixing it smoothly into the cream first lets the starch swell evenly as the dish boils and thickens.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Macadamia nutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, 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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