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Special Baked Potatoes

A baked potato stuffed with a creamy mashed potato mixture, topped with butter and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Special Baked Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Scrub the potatoes and bake them until tender.

  3. Cut off the tops of the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out the insides.

Fill and bake

  1. Mash the potato insides and mix in salt and cream until smooth.

  2. Fill the potato shells with the mashed mixture and smooth the tops.

  3. Dot with butter and sprinkle lightly with paprika.

  4. Place in the oven to brown.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Potato + creamtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the starchy flesh that is scooped out, mashed, and piped back into the shells.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the mashed potato smooth and soft.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour, and helps the tops brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Mash the potato insides and mix in salt and cream until smooth. Mashing while the potato is still hot and adding cream gradually helps it become smooth rather than gluey, since overworked starch becomes sticky and dense.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Onionfits about as well
  3. Leekfits less well
  4. Chivefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter. 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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