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Hashed Brown Potatoes

A dish of boiled potatoes sautéed with salt pork fat, pepper, and salt.

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 ↓

Hashed Brown Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Render the fat from the salt pork in a skillet until you have about ⅓ cup of fat.

  2. Add the chopped potatoes, pepper, and salt if needed.

Cook and serve

  1. Mix the potatoes thoroughly with the fat and cook for 3 minutes, stirring constantly.

  2. Let the mixture sit to brown underneath.

  3. Fold the potatoes like an omelet and turn onto a hot platter.

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

Salt pork
Renders fat that cooks the potatoes and adds savory flavor.
Potatoes
Provide the bulk of the dish; their starch crisps and browns on the hot fat.
Pepper
Adds a mild, sharp aroma and seasoning to the potatoes.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture sit to brown underneath. Stirring after the potatoes meet the hot fat keeps them from forming a crust. Leaving them undisturbed lets the surface touching the pan dry out and brown, which gives the crisp layer that defines hash browns.

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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