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Red Beans, Bourguignonne

A slow‑cooked dish of red beans with bacon, onions, carrots, parsley, claret wine, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Red Beans, Bourguignonne

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. In a saucepan, combine the beans, onions, carrots, parsley, and bacon.

  2. Add enough cold water to cover the ingredients and bring to a boil.

  3. Skim off any foam, then reduce heat and let it cook slowly.

  4. When the beans are three-quarters cooked, remove the onions, carrots, and parsley.

Finish and serve

  1. Drain off half the liquid and add the claret wine.

  2. Cover the saucepan and let it simmer until the beans are fully cooked.

  3. Before serving, stir in the butter and serve with sliced bacon.

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. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

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

  3. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Red beans
Form the body of the dish and become tender and creamy during slow cooking.
Bacon
Adds smoky, savoury fat and flavour that seasons the cooking liquid.
Claret wine
Adds acidity and depth, rounding out the flavour of the cooking liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky finish when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Skim off any foam, then reduce heat and let it cook slowly.. Foam that boils back into the pot can cloud the liquid and carry impurities into the beans. Gentle, slow cooking keeps the beans intact and tender instead of splitting and breaking apart.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, carrot, parsley, wine, butter):

  1. Chickpeafits about as well
  2. Beansthe original
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Sesamefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, carrot, parsley, wine, butter. 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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