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Hashed Potatoes

A dish of minced boiled potatoes cooked with butter, milk or stock, salt, pepper, and optional parsley or onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley 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 ↓

Hashed Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Mince the cold boiled potatoes and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Add ½ cup of milk or stock as preferred.

Cook

  1. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a hot omelet pan.

  2. Pour in the potatoes and spread them evenly.

  3. Cover and cook on the stove or in the oven until golden brown on the bottom.

  4. Fold the potatoes like an omelet and serve.

  5. For extra flavor, add minced parsley or onion.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the dish, and their starch browns and crisps the bottom as they cook.
Milk or stock
Adds moisture so the minced potatoes bind and stay tender rather than drying out.
Butter
Adds fat for richer flavor and helps the bottom of the potatoes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Cook until golden brown on the bottom before folding. Browning builds flavor and a crisp base that holds the cake together. Folding too early, before the bottom sets, can make the potatoes break apart.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper, milk, butter, onion):

  1. Garlicfits about as well
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Celeryfits less well

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