Name: String Beans, English Style
Ingredients: string beans; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; butter

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 ↓

String Beans, English Style

Ingredients

string beans
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
butter

Directions

Prepare

Prepare the string beans as in the previous recipe.

Cook the beans

Bring a pot of water to a boil and add the salt.
Add the beans and boil until tender, without covering the pot.
Drain the beans in a colander.

Serve

Serve with a piece of butter in the center and another on top.

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

String beans: Form the main vegetable, becoming tender as they boil in salted water.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, melting over the hot beans for flavor and moisture.

“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.