Skip to main content
Main

French or String Beans

A boiled string bean dish flavored with baking soda, sweet cream, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

French or String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Remove the strings from the beans and cut them into pieces about ½ inch long.

Cook

  1. Boil the beans with ¼ teaspoon of baking soda for about 30 minutes until tender. Add salt while boiling.

  2. Alternatively, cook the beans in just enough water to tenderize them without baking soda.

Finish and serve

  1. Before serving, stir in 1 cup of sweet cream, 2 tablespoons of butter, and season with salt and pepper.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

String beans
The main vegetable, cooked until tender and softened.
Baking soda
Raises the cooking water's alkalinity, helping the beans soften faster and stay green.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and body to the beans as they are finished.
Butter
Adds fat, flavor and a silky coating to the finished beans.

The step that matters

Cooking the beans until tender. Fresh beans need a long, gentle boil to soften fully. Stopping early leaves them fibrous, while overcooking makes them mushy and dull in color. Testing for tenderness matters more than the clock.

Swap the beans

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter, pepper. 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