Name: Long Branch Milk Potatoes
Ingredients: good, sound potatoes; milk; coarse sea salt

Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Long Branch Milk Potatoes

Ingredients

good, sound potatoes
milk
coarse sea salt

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

Slice the raw potatoes.
Place the milk in a pudding dish.
Add the sliced potatoes to the milk.

Bake and boil

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about 20 minutes.
Transfer the potatoes and milk to a saucepan.
Boil until the potatoes are done, seasoning before boiling.

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.

Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Form the body of the dish, softening into a tender, starchy base as they cook.
Milk: Provides moisture and richness, cooking down with the potato starch into a creamy sauce.

“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.