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To Cook Snap Beans

A dish of snap beans cooked with milk, butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

To Cook Snap Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Snap the beans and remove all strings.

Cook the beans

  1. Boil the beans in water with 1 teaspoon of salt for 2 hours if young, or 3 hours if old.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a separate pot, boil the milk.

  2. Rub the flour and butter together, then stir into the boiling milk until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the milk mixture into the beans, season with salt and pepper, and simmer for 5 more minutes before serving.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Beans + flourtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,080 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Snap beans
Form the main body of the dish, cooked until tender through long simmering.
Rich milk
Forms the creamy base of the sauce, giving the dish richness and body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and combines with flour to help thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter into the boiling milk. Adding the flour mixture to milk that is not yet hot, or stirring too little, can leave lumps. Constant stirring while it boils lets the starch swell evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Milletfits about as well
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, 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.

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