Skip to main content
Main

To Boil New Potatoes

Boiled new potatoes served plain or with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Boil New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scrape the skins from the new potatoes and soak them in cold water for 1-2 hours.

  2. Place the potatoes in an iron saucepan and cover them with water.

Boil and dry

  1. Bring to a boil and cook for 30 minutes.

  2. Check for doneness and cook a few minutes longer if needed.

  3. Drain the water and let the potatoes sit for a couple of minutes over low heat to dry.

Serve

  1. Serve plain or pour a little melted butter over them.

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. 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

New potatoes
Provide the main starchy body of the dish, which softens into a tender interior when boiled.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating of fat, optional and added at serving.

The step that matters

Checking doneness before draining. Potatoes that are undercooked stay firm and chalky in the centre, while overcooked ones become waterlogged and crumble. Testing with a knife near the end of cooking helps you catch the point where the interior is tender but the potato still holds its shape.

“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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes