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To Boil French Beans and Scarlet Runners

A boiled bean dish made with French beans and scarlet runners, seasoned with salt and served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,799 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Boil French Beans and Scarlet Runners

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the tops and tails of the beans and remove the strings from the sides of the pods.

  2. Slice the pods into thin pieces at a slant and soak them in cold water for a few minutes.

  3. Strain the beans and add them to boiling water with salt.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil rapidly without a lid for about 30 minutes or until soft.

  2. Strain through a colander and serve in a hot vegetable dish with butter.

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. 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

Beans
Provide the main body and texture of the dish as they soften during boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating of fat to the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly without a lid. Rapid boiling in an uncovered pot lets volatile compounds escape and keeps the beans from turning dull and stewed. Boiling until soft is the stage most likely to be misjudged, since beans vary in tenderness.

“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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