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French Beans a LA Poulette

A buttered, lime‑flavored French bean dish finished with roux, consommé, egg yolks, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,491 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

French Beans a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Boil the French beans in salted water until tender, then drain them.

  2. In a saucepan, add the drained beans and heat them until dry and hot.

Dress the beans

  1. Add butter, pepper, salt, and lime juice, shaking the pan to mix without breaking the beans.

  2. If the butter doesn't mix well, add a little white broth.

  3. Add a spoonful of butter, season with pepper, salt, and lime juice.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, mix white roux with consommé and thicken with egg yolks and parsley.

  2. When done, thicken with egg yolks and cream, and season with white pepper and salt.

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 + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lime + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together547 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Beans + limetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  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

French beans
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and then coated with the buttery sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a glossy, smooth coating to the beans.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as their proteins set when gently heated.
White roux
Flour and butter cooked together to thicken the consommé into a sauce.
Consommé
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying its flavour.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery flavour of the beans.

The step that matters

Thickening with egg yolks. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so the yolks must be added off the heat or over gentle heat. If the sauce gets too hot, the yolks scramble and turn grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, lime, egg, parsley, sugar, cream):

  1. Pistachiofits about as well
  2. Cashew nutfits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, lime, egg, parsley, sugar, cream. 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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