Skip to main content
Main

White Haricot Beans a LA BEETOKNl

A dish of white haricot beans cooked with butter, salt, pepper, parsley, and lemon juice, served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

White Haricot Beans a LA BEETOKNl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Soak the dried haricot beans in cold water for at least 6 hours.

  2. Boil the soaked beans in fresh water until tender.

  3. Drain the beans in a colander.

Finish and serve

  1. In a stewpan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter, then add the beans, salt, pepper, parsley, and lemon juice.

  2. Toss the mixture over the heat until well combined.

  3. Serve the beans with croutons around them.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Beans + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,733 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

Dried haricot beans
Form the dish's main body; soaking and boiling soften them until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, coating the beans and carrying flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the buttered beans.

The step that matters

Boiling the soaked beans until tender. Dried beans must be fully cooked to become soft and digestible; stopping early leaves them firm and chalky inside, while the starch softens gradually as they simmer in water.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Walnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, parsley, lemon. 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.

More white haricot beans recipes

Boiled 3 See all 4 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesGerman Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes