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Tamale Beans

A bean stew with ground beef, onions, tomatoes, sugar, and Spanish pepper thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tamale Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the beans

  1. Cook bayou beans in water with baking soda until tender; drain.

  2. Add more water and cook until done; season with salt and pepper.

Make the stew

  1. In a pan, melt butter and cook ground beef and onion until meat is done and separated.

  2. Add cooked beans, tomatoes, sugar, and dissolved Spanish pepper to the pan.

  3. Sift in flour until the mixture thickens, stirring constantly.

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 + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Beef + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,448 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

Bayo beans
Form the bulk of the stew and absorb liquid as they become tender.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's pH, helping beans soften more quickly.
Ground beef
Supplies rich flavor and fat that carry through the stew.
Tomatoes
Add acidity and moisture, building the stew's base flavor.
Flour
Thickens the stew as its starch swells in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Sift in flour while stirring constantly. Flour clumps if added too fast or left unstirred. Stirring disperses the starch so it swells evenly and thickens the stew smoothly instead of leaving lumps.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, pepper, butter, beef, tomato, sugar, flour):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pepper, butter, beef, tomato, sugar, flour. 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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