Skip to main content
Main

Broad Beans

A creamy purée of boiled broad beans mixed with lemon, egg yolks, butter, parsley, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Broad Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Shell the beans and place them in boiling water with 1 teaspoon of salt.

  2. Boil until tender, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks, cream, parsley, and pepper.

  2. Place the bowl over a pan of boiling water and stir until thickened.

  3. Add the butter and stir in the lemon juice.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine this mixture with the beans and serve.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Broad beans
Form the purée's main body and bulk once cooked and blended.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture as they gently set over heat, giving it a smooth, rich body.
Butter
Adds fat for a silky texture and rich flavour to the purée.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the butter and yolks.
Cream
Adds moisture and softness to the thickened egg mixture.

The step that matters

Thickening the egg yolks over water. Egg yolks thicken when gently heated but can scramble if overheated. Stirring over simmering water, not boiling contact, keeps the mixture smooth and creamy.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Beansthe original

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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes