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Haricot Beans, Boiled

A simple boiled haricot bean dish seasoned with salt, butter, pepper, lemon juice, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Haricot Beans, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Drain the beans and place them in a saucepan with plenty of cold water, slightly salted.

  2. Boil gently until tender, about two hours.

  3. Pour away the water.

  4. Let the beans stand by the fire for a minute or two, shaking them occasionally to dry.

Season and serve

  1. Add a small piece of butter, pepper, and salt.

  2. Serve hot.

  3. For variation, mix drained beans with butter, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and chopped parsley in a stewpan.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 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. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Form the main body of the dish, softening into a tender, starchy base when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the warm beans.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich, starchy beans.

The step that matters

Boil gently until tender. Beans need a long, gentle simmer to soften fully; a hard rolling boil can break the skins and leave the beans ragged, while stopping early leaves them firm and chalky inside.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

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