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Windsor Beans

A stew of Windsor beans cooked in sauce tournée with parsley, green onions, savory, sugar, egg yolks, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the Windsor beans in salted water until nearly done.

  2. Drain the beans and stew them in sauce tournée with parsley, green onions, and finely chopped savory.

  3. Add a small lump of sugar and reduce the mixture.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the yolks of two eggs with a little thick cream.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the beans and sauce until thickened.

  3. Serve the beans in a short sauce, properly seasoned.

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 + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Sauce + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Windsor beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the sauce flavour.
Sauce tournée (no.19)
Provides the flavourful base sauce that coats and moistens the beans.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce as they heat, giving it a smooth, enriched texture.
Thick cream
Adds richness and fat, softening the set of the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg mixture into the beans. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble and curdle if the mixture boils or is added too hot. Keep the heat low and stir steadily until the sauce just thickens.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sauce, onion, sugar, egg, cream):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sauce, onion, sugar, egg, cream. 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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