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Beans, Boiled French

Boiled French beans served with plain melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Beans, Boiled French

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cut off the heads and tails of the beans and remove the strings by slicing a thin strip along each side.

  2. Divide each bean into 4 or 6 pieces, cutting them lengthwise at a slant, and place them in cold water with a little salt dissolved in it.

Cook and serve

  1. In a saucepan, bring the salted water and baking soda to a boil.

  2. Add the beans to the boiling water and cook quickly with the lid uncovered, ensuring they do not get overcooked.

  3. Drain the beans in a colander.

  4. Serve the beans with plain melted 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

Young french beans
Provide the main vegetable; their tender texture softens quickly when boiled.
Plain melted butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and coats the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Cook quickly and do not overcook. Beans turn soft, grey and mushy when cooked too long, because heat breaks down their cell walls and chlorophyll. Brief cooking in fast-boiling water keeps them tender-crisp and bright green.

“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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