Skip to main content
Main

Favorite Warmed Potatoes

A dish of boiled potatoes served warm in butter and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Favorite Warmed Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes whole with skins on in plenty of salted water until just tender, preferably the day before serving.

  2. Remove the skins and slice the potatoes into ¼‑inch thick slices.

  3. In a chopping bowl, season the potatoes with salt and pepper, then chop them into small square pieces.

Heat and serve

  1. About 25 minutes before serving, melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Once the butter is melted, add the milk and bring to a boil.

  3. Add the chopped potatoes to the boiling milk, stirring gently to moisten them.

  4. Cover and place the saucepan on the back of the stove or in a moderate oven to heat through gradually.

  5. Once heated, stir carefully from the bottom and cover tightly again to keep warm until ready to serve.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk of the dish and absorb the buttered milk, becoming soft and creamy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the potatoes a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Rich sweet milk
Forms the moistening liquid that softens the potatoes and makes them tender and creamy.

The step that matters

Heat gradually and keep the pan covered. Milk scorches and sticks to the pan if it boils hard or heats too fast, and stirring from the bottom stops potatoes at the base from burning while the rest stays warm.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, egg, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Chivefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, egg, milk. 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

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes