Skip to main content
Main

Potatoes a LA Delmonico

Potatoes à la Delmonico are boiled potatoes cooked in butter with coarse sea salt.

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

Why it works: Potato and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and 6,445 recipes mention both. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

  1. Cut the potatoes into small balls about the size of a marble.

  2. Place them in a saucepan with plenty of butter and a good sprinkling of coarse sea salt.

  3. Cover the saucepan and shake occasionally until the potatoes are fully cooked, about 1 hour.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Potato + buttertop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,445 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
Provide the starchy body of the dish, becoming tender as they cook through.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the potatoes brown lightly and carry flavour.

The step that matters

Cover the saucepan and shake occasionally. Covering traps steam so the potatoes cook through evenly, while occasional shaking keeps them from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pan.

“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

Illustration of Potato CroquettesIllustrationPotato Croquettes255 recipesIllustration of Potato RollsIllustrationPotato Rolls78 recipesIllustration of Potato ChipsIllustrationPotato Chips53 recipesIllustration of Sweet Potato CroquettesIllustrationSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes