Name: Hashes and Toasts
Ingredients: lean meat; fat meat; meat juice from a roast (optional); fresh butter (optional); cold potatoes (optional)

Why it works: Butter and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hashes and Toasts

Ingredients

Directions

Select only good quality meat, discarding any hard or gristly pieces.
Slice the lean meat thinly across the grain and shave the fat very thin.
Chop all the meat together until it is as fine as minced meat.
Ensure your stew-pan and chopping bowl are thoroughly clean.
If using meat juice, ensure it is sweet and remove any sediment; add a little fat or fresh butter if the meat is lean.
If using cold potatoes, ensure they are in good condition.

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 + potatotop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,456 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Meat + potatotop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together786 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,594 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).