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Salad

Brown Bean Salad

A salad of cooked brown or red kidney beans mixed with parsley, onion juice, nutmeg, salt, pepper, and French dressing, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Brown Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the salad

  1. In a bowl, mix the cooked beans with parsley, onion juice, nutmeg, salt, and pepper.

  2. Moisten the mixture well with French dressing.

  3. Let the salad stand for at least 30 minutes in a cool place, stirring occasionally.

Serve

  1. Serve the salad arranged on inner leaves of lettuce.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 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

Kidney beans
Form the bulk of the salad and provide its main texture and body.
French dressing
Adds moisture and acidity that soak into the beans and flavour them.
Onion juice
Adds a sharp, aromatic onion flavour to the beans.

The step that matters

Letting the salad stand. Standing allows the dressing to soak into the beans and the flavours to blend. Stirring occasionally spreads the dressing and seasoning evenly so no bean stays dry or overly seasoned.

Swap the kidney beans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, onion, nutmeg, pepper, lettuce):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Kidney beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, onion, nutmeg, pepper, lettuce. 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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