Name: Baked Potatoes
Ingredients: large potatoes (Prince Alberts are best); butter; coarse sea salt

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 ↓

Baked Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

large potatoes (Prince Alberts are best)
butter
coarse sea salt

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Wash the large potatoes.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until soft, about 45 minutes.
Serve with butter and coarse sea salt.

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.

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: Starchy flesh turns fluffy and soft when baked, forming the main body of the dish.
Butter: Adds fat and richness that melts into the hot potato flesh for moisture and flavour.

“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.