Name: Baked White Potatoes
Ingredients: 4 medium white potatoes; 2 tablespoons lard; 2 tablespoons 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 ↓

Baked White Potatoes

Ingredients

4 medium white potatoes
2 tablespoons lard
2 tablespoons butter

Directions

Boil the potatoes for about 20 minutes.
Grease a baking tin with lard and add pieces of butter.
Place the boiled potatoes in the tin and bake until golden 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.

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

Potatoes: Starch that softens when boiled and then crisps and browns in the oven.
Lard: Fat that greases the tin and promotes browning on the potato surface.
Butter: Fat that adds richness and flavour as it melts over the potatoes in the tin.

“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.