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Potato Noodles

A dish of boiled potato noodles topped with browned breadcrumbs and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Potato Noodles

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mash the cooked potatoes in a bowl.

  2. Mix in the eggs and salt.

  3. Add enough flour to form a dough that can be rolled out.

  4. Cut the dough into wide noodle shapes.

Cook and serve

  1. Drop the noodles into boiling water and cook for 15 minutes.

  2. Drain the noodles and serve topped with browned bread crumbs and butter.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 dough and give the noodles a soft, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the mashed potato into a cohesive dough that holds its shape.
Flour
Adds enough structure to the dough so it can be rolled out and cut.
Butter
Adds richness and, when browned, a nutty aroma and color to the finished noodles.

The step that matters

Adding the flour. Too much flour makes the noodles dense and tough, while too little leaves the dough sticky and hard to roll and cut. Add it gradually until the dough just holds together.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, bread, 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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