Skip to main content
Main

Chickens with French Beans

A dish of boiled chickens served with sautéed French beans and a lemon‑butter sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and chicken are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,432 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Chickens with French Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cut the French beans into squares.

  2. Boil the beans in soft water with salt until very green.

  3. Drain the beans immediately in a sieve.

Cook and serve the chicken

  1. Boil the chickens and place them on a serving dish.

  2. Garnish the chickens with the French beans.

  3. Squeeze lemon juice into the hot butter sauce and pour it over the chickens.

  4. Serve immediately.

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 + chickentop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,432 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

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

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Chicken + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,902 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Chicken + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,092 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Chickens
Provide the main protein, cooked by boiling to a tender texture.
French beans
Add fresh flavour, colour and a crisp-tender texture as a garnish.
Hot butter sauce
Adds richness and fat, coating the chicken with moisture and flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery sauce and balances its richness.

The step that matters

Drain the beans immediately. Beans keep cooking from their residual heat, which dulls their bright green colour and softens them. Draining straight away and cooling them quickly keeps them vivid and crisp-tender.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, chicken, butter, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, chicken, butter, 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.

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCreamed ChickenCreamed Chicken89 recipes