Name: Potatoes with Butter
Ingredients: new potatoes or small old potatoes; salt; 1 tablespoon butter

Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potatoes with Butter

Ingredients

new potatoes or small old potatoes
salt
1 tablespoon butter

Directions

Prepare

Scrape and wash new potatoes or peel small old ones.

Boil

Boil in salted water for 30 minutes or until done.

Butter and serve

Drain the potatoes and place them in a saucepan with 1 tablespoon of butter.
Gently turn the potatoes over for a minute or two.
Serve with the butter poured over them.

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 + buttertop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

New potatoes or small old potatoes: Form the main body of the dish, providing starchy texture when boiled until tender.
Butter: Adds richness and flavour, coating the potatoes as they are turned.

“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.