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Piquant Potatoes

Piquant Potatoes are boiled potatoes with bacon, flour, vinegar, sugar, and salt, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Piquant Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes in their skins until tender.

  2. Cut the bacon into small dice and place in a saucepan over medium heat until the fat has melted.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the flour and a little sugar to the bacon, and cook until browned.

  2. Add water to the saucepan to create a thick sauce and bring to a boil.

  3. Slice the boiled potatoes thickly and add them to the sauce.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil again, then season with vinegar, salt, and sugar to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve hot.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Potato + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,608 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + vinegartop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 dish and absorb the sharp, sweet sauce.
Bacon
Melts its fat to create the base for the sauce and adds savory, smoky flavor.
Flour
Thickens the bacon fat and drippings into a smooth sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the sauce its piquant, sharp flavor.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the bacon fat. Flour must cook in the fat until browned so it loses its raw taste and thickens properly. Adding water too early can leave lumps or a pasty flavor in the sauce.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, vinegar, sugar. 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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