Skip to main content
Main

Broad or Windsor Beans

Boiled broad beans served with parsley sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Beans and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,376 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Broad or Windsor Beans

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Shell the beans and put them into boiling salted water.

  2. Boil rapidly until tender, about 15 minutes for very young beans or 20 to 25 minutes for moderate-sized beans.

  3. Drain the beans in a colander.

  4. Serve the beans with a boat of parsley sauce on the side.

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 + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,376 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Beans + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,184 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Parsley + saucetop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Broad beans
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled.
Parsley sauce
Adds a rich, creamy contrast to the mild, soft beans.

The step that matters

Boil rapidly until tender. Beans cooked too gently or for too short a time stay firm and starchy inside, while overcooking makes them mushy. Rapid boiling in plenty of salted water cooks them evenly and tenderises the skins and flesh, so checking for tenderness at the stated times matters.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, 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.

You might also like

German Style String BeansGerman Style String Beans7 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes