Name: Beans and Bacon
Ingredients: Windsor beans; salt; water; bacon; chopped parsley; butter

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 ↓

Beans and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Boil young and fresh Windsor beans in salted water until tender.
Drain the beans and place boiled bacon over them without any sauce.

Make the parsley butter

In a separate bowl, melt butter and mix in chopped parsley.

Serve

Serve the melted butter with parsley in a sauceboat alongside the beans and 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.

Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,376 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together28,563 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,799 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Windsor beans: Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft when boiled.
Bacon: Adds savory, salty flavor and a meaty texture to the dish.
Butter: Adds richness and a smooth, fatty coating when melted.
Chopped parsley: Adds fresh, herbal aroma to the melted butter.