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Salad

String-bean Salad

A salad of boiled string beans dressed with French dressing and garnished with parsley and chicory or nasturtium leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and chicory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

String-bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cut each string bean into four strips lengthwise.

  2. Boil the beans in salted water until tender, then drain carefully.

  3. Let the beans cool, then pile them on a flat dish and trim the ends evenly.

Dress and garnish

  1. Pour French dressing over the beans slowly.

  2. Garnish with parsley, white chicory leaves, or nasturtium leaves.

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. Parsley + chicorytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together41 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Beans + chicorytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
Form the main body of the salad and provide the crisp-tender bite once cooked.
French dressing
Adds moisture, acidity and flavour that coats the cooked beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans until tender, then drain carefully. Boiling in salted water seasons the beans and softens them evenly. Overcooking turns them limp and dull, while under-draining leaves excess water that dilutes the dressing.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, chicory. 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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