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Potato Balls with Parsley

Potato balls with parsley are boiled potatoes mixed with butter, lemon juice, parsley, salt, and cayenne pepper, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potato Balls with Parsley

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, ensuring they are similar in size.

  2. While the potatoes are boiling, beat the butter until creamy.

  3. Mix in the lemon juice, minced parsley, salt, and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Drain the potatoes.

  2. Serve the potatoes hot, topped with the butter mixture.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

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

Potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and a creamy texture that coats the hot potatoes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery flavor.
Parsley
Contributes a fresh, herbal aroma and flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the potatoes until tender, using similar sizes. Potatoes cook through at different rates depending on size. Choosing similar sizes lets them all become tender at the same time, so none are hard in the center or overcooked on the outside.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, parsley, pepper. 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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