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Succotash

Succotash is a corn and lima bean dish cooked with butter, milk, and béchamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and lima beans work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 222 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Succotash

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Scrape corn from the ears and place in a saucepan with cooked lima beans.

  2. Add butter, salt, pepper, and milk to the saucepan.

  3. Heat thoroughly for 5 minutes, then add hot béchamel sauce.

  4. Stir all ingredients together and serve very hot.

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. Corn + lima beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together222 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  4. Corn + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lima beans + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together414 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

Corn
Provides sweetness and the main body of the dish.
Lima beans
Add starchy, creamy texture and bulk to the dish.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the vegetables into a creamy mixture.
Béchamel sauce
Thickens the mixture and adds a smooth, creamy binding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a rounded, savoury flavour.

Swap the lima beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, butter, pepper, milk, sauce):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Lima beansthe original
  3. Peanutfits about as well
  4. Walnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, butter, pepper, milk, 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.

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