Skip to main content
Main

Pork and Beans

A stew of pickled young pork shoulder with onion, carrot, turnip, peppercorns, broad beans, and parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Pork and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pork

  1. Place the pork in a stewpan and cover it with warm water, then bring to a boil.

  2. Add the onion, carrot, turnip, and peppercorns.

  3. Boil gently for about 2 hours.

Cook the beans

  1. One hour before the pork is done, add the broad beans to salted boiling water.

  2. Boil the beans gently for 25 to 30 minutes, then drain them well.

Serve

  1. Pour parsley sauce over the beans.

  2. Serve the pork and beans on separate dishes.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork shoulder
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Broad beans
Supply starchy body and a soft, mealy texture once cooked through.
Parsley sauce
Adds moisture and richness that coat the beans and balance their earthiness.

The step that matters

Boil the beans gently. Vigorous boiling can split the bean skins and turn the beans mushy. A gentle simmer keeps them whole and tender, and timing them to finish with the pork keeps everything hot together.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, carrot, turnip, beans, parsley, sauce. 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.

More pork and beans recipes

Baked 27Boston 10Boston baked 3Corned 3 See all 78 →

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTurnip SoupTurnip Soup43 recipes