Name: String Bean Dinner
Ingredients: 2 pounds bacon; 4 pecks string beans; 1 onion; 3 ears green corn or 1 can corn

Why it works: Beans and corn match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,211 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

String Bean Dinner

Ingredients

2 pounds bacon
4 pecks string beans
1 onion
3 ears green corn or 1 can corn

Directions

Boil the bacon, string beans, and onion together until tender.
Add the corn and boil again for 5 minutes.
Serve hot.

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.

Beans + corntop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,211 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,242 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + corntop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,205 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon: Adds fat and smoky, savory flavor to the cooking liquid and beans.
String beans: Form the main body of the dish and become tender after long boiling.
Corn: Adds sweetness and a fresh, tender bite to the finished dish.