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Haricot Beans, Boiled

Boiled haricot beans seasoned with butter and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Haricot Beans, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the beans overnight.

  2. Combine the soaked beans, cold water, and salt in a saucepan.

  3. Boil gently for two hours, then strain.

Finish and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan, then add the beans to the melted butter.

  2. Sprinkle with parsley and shake the pan over the heat for a few minutes.

  3. Serve.

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Beans + buttertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,799 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Haricot beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and creamy after long gentle boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating that carries flavour over the beans.
Parsley
Adds fresh, green aroma and a light herbal note to the buttered beans.

The step that matters

Boil gently for two hours. A gentle simmer softens the beans evenly without breaking their skins; a hard, rolling boil can split them and leave them mushy and ragged.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, parsley. 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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