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A Green-bean Pudding

A green bean pudding made by boiling beans, blending with cream, egg yolk, pepper, salt, optional spinach juice, and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

A Green-bean Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Boil and blanch the green beans.

  2. Beat the beans in a mortar with pepper, salt, cream, and egg yolk. Add spinach juice for color if desired.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a basin and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Serve topped with melted butter and parsley, alongside 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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Spinach + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,025 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Green beans + spinachtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10 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

Green beans
Provide the main body and vegetable flavor of the pudding.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, giving the pudding a soft, smooth texture.
Egg yolk
Acts as a binder, helping the pudding set as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the finished pudding when melted over the top.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding for 1 hour. Egg yolk sets with gentle, sustained heat, so the pudding needs a steady boil long enough to firm through. Too little time leaves it loose, while overcooking can make it grainy or rubbery.

Swap the spinach

The recipe marks spinach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (green beans, pepper, cream, egg, butter, parsley):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachthe original
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against green beans, pepper, cream, egg, butter, parsley. 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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