Skip to main content
Main

Spanish Beans

A bean dish with white and brown beans, onion, chili pepper, and tomato, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

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

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Parboil the white beans and brown beans separately.

Cook the beans

  1. In a pot, combine the parboiled beans, chopped onion, and chili pepper.

  2. Cook the large tomato with coarse sea salt until dry but not burnt.

  3. Add the cooked tomato to the bean mixture and cook everything together until heated through.

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. Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,713 recipes

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

  2. Beans + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,242 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  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

White beans
Provide the main body and creamy texture of the dish.
Brown beans
Add earthy flavour and a second texture alongside the white beans.
Onion
Adds savory sweetness and aroma as it softens during cooking.
Tomato
Adds acidity and body once cooked down with salt.

The step that matters

Cooking the tomato until dry but not burnt. Cooking the tomato down with salt concentrates its flavour and removes excess water, so it blends into the beans rather than thinning them. Too high heat scorches the sugars and leaves a bitter taste.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, pepper, tomato. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes