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Pork and Beans

A stew of pickled young pork shoulder with onions, carrots, turnip, peppercorns, and broad beans, served with parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Pork and Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the pork

  1. Place the pork in a large pot and cover it with warm water.

  2. Bring the water to a boil, then add the onion, carrot, turnip, and peppercorns.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer gently for about 2 hours.

Cook the beans and serve

  1. About 1 hour before the pork is done, add the broad beans to salted boiling water.

  2. Boil the beans gently for 25 to 30 minutes, then drain well.

  3. Serve the pork and beans on separate dishes, drizzled with parsley sauce.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + beanstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork shoulder
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering that breaks down connective tissue.
Broad beans
Provide the starchy, earthy body of the dish and soften as they are boiled.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the simmering broth.
Carrot
Adds gentle sweetness to the simmering liquid.
Turnip
Adds a mild, slightly peppery flavour to the broth.

The step that matters

Simmer the pork gently. A rolling boil toughens meat proteins and can make the pork dry and stringy, while gentle simmering lets connective tissue slowly soften into tender meat.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, carrot, turnip, beans, parsley, sauce):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, carrot, turnip, beans, parsley, sauce. 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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