Name: Windsor or Horse Beans
Ingredients: 2 cups Windsor or horse beans; boiling water; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Butter and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 85,593 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Windsor or Horse Beans

Ingredients

2 cups Windsor or horse beans
boiling water
2 tablespoons butter
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Directions

Prepare

Shell the beans and place them in a pan.
Pour boiling water over the beans, cover, and let them stand in a warm place for 15 minutes.
Drain the water and remove the thick brown skin from the beans.

Cook and serve

Put the beans in a saucepan with a little water and boil until soft.
Drain the beans and season with butter, pepper, and salt.

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.

Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Horse + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together216 recipes

Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).
Horse + buttertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together143 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Windsor or horse beans: Provide the main body and starchy, soft texture of the dish.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, coating the beans with flavour and smoothness.

The step that matters

Remove the thick brown skin. The skin is tough and bitter-tasting when cooked, so removing it after soaking gives the beans a softer, more pleasant texture.

“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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Windsor or Horse Beans