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P French Beans, Plain

A simple boiled French bean dish seasoned with sugar and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,587 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

P French Beans, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the strings and stalks from the French beans. If they are old, split them.

Cook

  1. Place the beans in a saucepan with plenty of boiling water.

  2. Add the sugar and salt.

  3. Boil the beans until tender, checking for doneness by tasting.

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 + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans
Form the main body of the dish and are the element that becomes tender through boiling.
Sugar
Adds a slight sweetness that balances the savoury salt and the beans' green flavour.
Salt
Seasons the beans directly as they cook in the boiling water.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender, checking by tasting. Beans go from crisp to mushy within a short window. Tasting as they cook catches the point where they are tender but still hold their shape and colour, because overcooking breaks down cell walls and dulls the green pigment.

“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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