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Young Potatoes

Boiled young potatoes served with a butter, flour, milk or stock, and egg yolk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Young Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash and peel the young potatoes.

  2. Boil them quickly in a little water with the lemon juice.

  3. Drain the potatoes and place them in a saucepan.

Make the sauce

  1. Add butter rolled in flour.

  2. Moisten with milk or stock.

  3. Thicken the sauce with the beaten egg yolk.

  4. Season to taste.

  5. Heat until hot.

Serve

  1. Serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Young potatoes
Form the main body of the dish, holding the creamy sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk or stock into a smooth sauce base.
Milk or stock
Supplies the liquid that makes the sauce pourable and creamy.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce as it gently heats, giving a silky texture.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with the beaten egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens through heat, but if the sauce boils after it goes in, the proteins can scramble and curdle the sauce. Heat gently and stir constantly.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, butter, flour, milk, egg, pepper. 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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