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Parisian Potatoes

Parboiled potatoes baked until soft, basted with melted butter.

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

Parisian Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and parboil

  1. Wash and peel the potatoes, then soak them in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Parboil the potatoes in boiling salted water for 15 minutes.

  3. Drain the potatoes and place them in a dripping pan.

Bake

  1. Bake the potatoes until soft, basting them three times with melted butter.

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

Potatoes
Starch that becomes soft and fluffy inside as the potatoes cook through.
Butter
Fat that carries flavor and helps the surface brown as it bakes.

The step that matters

Parboiling the potatoes. Parboiling partly cooks the potatoes before they go into the oven, so the interior softens evenly while the outside has time to develop color during baking. Draining them well before the dripping pan keeps excess water from steaming the surface.

“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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