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Lima Beans

A simple boiled lima bean dish seasoned with pepper, salt, butter, and optional onion and cream, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Lima Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select very young lima beans and sort them as you shell.

  2. Soak the small beans in cold water.

Cook

  1. Boil a large kettle of slightly salted water.

  2. Add the beans and boil for 40 to 60 minutes, depending on their age.

  3. Drain the beans and return them to the pot.

  4. Add pepper, coarse sea salt, butter, and grated fried onion if desired.

  5. Stew gently for 10 to 15 minutes.

  6. Alternatively, add cream, butter, pepper, and salt after draining, and stew for 10 to 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with finely chopped parsley.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  5. Lima beans + oniontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together331 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

Lima beans
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the beans.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture when stewed with the beans.

The step that matters

Boil the beans for the full time. Lima beans vary in age and starch content, so boiling until fully tender matters. Undercooked beans stay firm and mealy, while the cooking time must be judged by their age.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lima beans, pepper, butter, cream, parsley):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

More lima beans recipes

Creamed 13Boiled 8Canned 8Dried 6Stewed 6Baked 3 See all 92 →

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