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Hash Brown Potatoes

A skillet dish of chopped boiled potatoes cooked with rendered pork fat, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,668 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Hash Brown Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut fat salt pork into small pieces and render the fat in an iron skillet.

Cook the potatoes

  1. Add the finely chopped cold boiled potatoes to the skillet and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Toss the potatoes until well mixed with the fat and cook for 4 minutes, tossing constantly.

  3. Press the potatoes to one side of the skillet to form an omelet shape.

  4. When browned underneath, turn the potatoes onto a hot serving dish, top side down.

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. Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

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

  3. Pork + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,121 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fat salt pork
Melts to supply the fat that fries the potatoes and gives them flavor.
Cold boiled potatoes
Form the body of the dish; cold potatoes hold their shape and crisp when fried.

The step that matters

Press the potatoes to one side of the skillet to form an omelet shape.. Pressing the potatoes into a flat layer gives full contact with the hot fat, so the underside browns evenly into a crust rather than steaming.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Tomatofits less well
  4. Carrotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, 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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