Skip to main content
Main

String Beans

A simple boiled string bean dish seasoned with butter, salt, pepper, and optional sweet cream or milk.

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

Why it works: Butter and cream 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 ↓

String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Snip off the ends of the string beans and remove the strings, cutting them into pieces about an inch long.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the string beans in salted water until tender.

  2. Remove the beans with a skimmer and season with butter, salt, and pepper.

  3. Alternatively, drain the beans, return them to the saucepan, add sweet cream or milk, and heat to boiling.

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. Butter + creamtop 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. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel when seasoning the cooked beans.
Sweet cream or milk
Adds moisture and creaminess in the alternative finish, mellowing the beans' flavor.

The step that matters

Boil until tender. Boiling in salted water softens the fibrous bean walls and seasons the beans from within. Stopping too early leaves them tough, while overcooking makes them limp and dull in color.

Swap the beans

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

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

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

Canned 17Pickled 11Creamed 9Boiled 6French 5German 3 See all 97 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes