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To Boil Broad Beans

A simple boiled broad bean dish seasoned with salt, parsley, butter, and ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

To Boil Broad Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Shell the broad beans.

  2. Put the beans into boiling water with salt and the tied bunch of parsley.

  3. Boil until tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Chop the parsley and mix it with melted butter.

  2. Serve the beans in a dish, garnished with warmed slices of ham around them.

  3. Pour melted butter over the beans.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  5. Beans + hamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together140 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Broad beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled.
Melted butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the beans with fat.
Parsley
Adds a fresh, aromatic herbal flavour to the cooking water and butter.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour as a central garnish.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Beansthe original
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutfits about as well
  4. Lima beansfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, butter, ham. 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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