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Potatoes a LA Maitre D' Hotel

A simple potato dish cooked with maître d'hôtel butter and broth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then peel them.

  2. Cut the potatoes into quarter-inch slices.

Finish and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine the potato slices with the maître d'hôtel butter and broth.

  2. Heat over medium until hot, then serve immediately to prevent the butter from becoming oily.

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
Form the main body of the dish, with starch giving a soft, tender texture.
Maître d'hôtel butter
Adds fat and herb flavour, coating the slices and giving a rich mouthfeel.
Broth
Adds liquid that moistens the potatoes and carries the butter through the slices.

The step that matters

Heat over medium, then serve immediately. Butter is an emulsion of fat and water. Overheating or holding it too long can cause the emulsion to break, so the butter separates and leaves a greasy, oily texture.

“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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