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Haricot Beans with Eggs

A dish of boiled haricot beans topped with a butter‑flour‑milk sauce and poached eggs, garnished with chopped parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Haricot Beans with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the haricot beans overnight in plenty of cold water.

  2. Pick out the imperfect beans and boil the rest in warm water.

  3. As the water boils away, add more cold water.

  4. Cook the beans for about two hours, then strain through a colander.

Make the sauce and eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for ten minutes, then remove the shells.

  2. Chop the parsley finely.

  3. In a saucepan, melt the butter and mix in the flour over heat.

  4. Add the milk and boil for one minute.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in the raw yolk of one egg and a little salt.

Serve

  1. Place the beans in a serving dish.

  2. Pour the sauce over the beans.

  3. Place an egg at each corner and sprinkle with parsley.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Haricot beans
Form the bulk of the dish, providing body and a starchy, filling texture.
Butter
Melts with flour to form the base of the sauce, adding richness and fat.
Flour
Combines with melted butter to thicken the milk into a smooth sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid of the sauce, which thickens when boiled with the butter and flour.
Eggs
Provide protein for structure, and the raw yolk enriches and thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the raw yolk off the heat. Adding a raw yolk to a boiling sauce can scramble it. Removing the pan from heat first lets the yolk thicken the sauce gently and smoothly.

Swap the beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, parsley, butter, flour, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, parsley, butter, flour, egg. 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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