Name: Fork and Beans
Ingredients: 1 piece of corned pork; 1 quart of hominy or navy beans

Why it works: Pork and beans 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 ↓

Fork and Beans

Ingredients

1 piece of corned pork
1 quart of hominy or navy beans

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Wash the corned pork clean.
Place the pork in a pot with the hominy or navy beans and boil for 1 hour.

Cook the beans

Remove the pork and continue boiling the beans for an additional hour.
Transfer the beans to a pan and place the pork in the center.

Bake

Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 3 hours.

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.

Pork + beanstop 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

Corned pork: Supplies the main savory, salty flavor and tender meat for the dish.
Hominy or navy beans: Form the bulk of the dish and absorb flavor from the cooking liquid.

“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.