Name: White Beans a LA Maitre d'Hotel
Ingredients: 2 cups white beans (fresh or dried); ½ cup fresh butter; 2 tablespoons chopped parsley; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); ½ lemon

Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

White Beans a LA Maitre d'Hotel

Ingredients

2 cups white beans (fresh or dried)
½ cup fresh butter
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
¼ teaspoon pepper
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
½ lemon

Directions

Prepare the beans

Soak dried beans in cold water for 1 hour.
Boil the beans in fresh water until tender.

Finish and serve

Melt butter in a stew pan and add chopped parsley, pepper, and salt.
Add drained beans to the pan and gently move the pan without stirring.
Squeeze juice of half a lemon over the beans and serve 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.

Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Beans + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,376 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
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

White beans: Form the main body of the dish and absorb the buttery, herbed coating.
Butter: Adds richness and carries the parsley and pepper flavour through the beans.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and balances the dish.

The step that matters

Gently moving the pan with the beans. Stirring can break down the tender beans and make them mushy. Gently shaking the pan coats the beans in butter while keeping them whole.

Swap the beans

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

Chickpeafits better
Walnutfits about as well
Pistachiofits about as well
Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley, pepper, lemon. 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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White Beans a LA Maitre d'Hotel