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Luncheon Potatoes

A simple sautéed potato dish with butter, onion, salt, and dry mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Luncheon Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the butter in a skillet.

  2. Add the chopped onion and brown it.

  3. Stir in the cold potatoes and let them brown.

  4. Before serving, sprinkle with salt and dry mustard.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Potato + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,340 recipes

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

  4. Butter + potatotop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Cold potatoes form the bulk of the dish and brown into crisp, golden surfaces.
Onion
Browning the onion adds sweetness and savory depth to the dish.
Butter
Fat carries the heat across the skillet and promotes browning of the potatoes and onion.

The step that matters

Let the potatoes brown undisturbed. Cold potatoes need steady contact with the hot pan surface to develop a crust. Stirring too often prevents browning and leaves them soft and steamed.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, potato):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, potato. 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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