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Potatoes Mashed

A simple dish of boiled potatoes mashed with milk or cream, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potatoes Mashed

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and wash the potatoes.

  2. Put them in boiling water with a little salt.

  3. When done, drain and let them stand until perfectly dry.

Mash and serve

  1. Mash the potatoes until smooth.

  2. Add milk or cream, a small piece of butter, and more salt.

  3. Beat with a spoon until creamy and light.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

  3. 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 breaks down into the soft, fluffy body of the mash.
Milk or cream
Adds moisture and richness, loosening the mash and softening its texture.
Butter
Adds fat for smoothness and flavor in the finished mash.

The step that matters

Drying the potatoes after draining. Letting the potatoes stand dry lets excess surface water evaporate. Wet potatoes turn gluey and watery when mashed and absorb the added milk less evenly.

“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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