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Best Pork and Beans

A stew of white beans and sweet salt pork, served with pickles and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and pork are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,000 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Best Pork and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over the beans and soak them overnight.

  2. Discard the soaking water.

  3. Boil the beans.

Cook

  1. Cover the beans with cold water and add the pork.

  2. Boil until the beans are tender.

Finish and serve

  1. Transfer the beans to one pan.

  2. Transfer the pork to another pan.

  3. Score the pork through the skin.

  4. Place the pork in the center of the beans before serving.

  5. Serve with pickles and horseradish.

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 + porktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,000 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

Small white beans
Starch that softens with long simmering, giving the dish its body and tender texture.
Sweet salt pork
Adds fat and savory flavor that seasons the beans as they cook.

The step that matters

Boil until the beans are tender. Beans soften only when simmered long enough for their starch to hydrate and swell. Stopping early leaves them firm, while a hard rolling boil can split their skins and make them mushy.

“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.

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