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An Excellent Receipt for French Beans a LA Franqcaise

A creamy sauce of butter, flour, veal gravy or cream, egg yolks, and lemon juice coats tender green beans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

An Excellent Receipt for French Beans a LA Franqcaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Prepare the beans and boil them until tender, then drain well.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a clean saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook gently until lightly browned.

  3. Add salt and pepper, then gradually pour in the veal gravy or cream.

  4. Toss the beans in the sauce until heated through.

  5. Remove from heat and quickly stir in the beaten egg yolks and lemon juice.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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. Beans + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Butter
Provides fat and richness, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
All-purpose flour
Cooked in the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Veal gravy or sweet rich cream
Liquid that becomes the body of the sauce and adds savory or creamy flavor.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, giving it a smooth, velvety texture when gently heated.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the richness of the butter and yolks.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolks off the heat. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and can curdle or scramble if the sauce is too hot. Removing the pan from the heat before adding them, and stirring quickly, keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, veal, egg, lemon. 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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