Skip to main content
Main

Haricot Beans, Stewed

A stew of boiled haricot beans with bacon, onion, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,242 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Haricot Beans, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bacon and onion

  1. Cut the bacon into small dice.

  2. Pour boiling water over the bacon, let it stand for five minutes, then drain.

  3. Brown the bacon in a stewpan.

  4. Mince the onion and boil it for five minutes, then add it to the stewpan with the bacon.

Stew the beans

  1. Add the brown sauce and cook slowly for ten minutes.

  2. Add the boiled beans and cook for an additional ten minutes.

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

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

  2. Beans + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sauce + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and onion barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled beans
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavour of the sauce as they stew.
Brown sauce
Adds savoury depth and a rich brown colour to the stew.
Bacon
Provides fat and smoky, savoury flavour, and browns to build flavour in the pan.
Onion
Contributes aroma and savoury background flavour once softened.

The step that matters

Stew slowly after adding the brown sauce. Cooking gently keeps the sauce from scorching on the bottom of the pan and lets its flavours meld evenly with the bacon and onion before the beans go in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, sauce):

  1. Welsh onionfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, sauce. 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.

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes