Skip to main content
Main

Potatoes Rechauffe

Creamy boiled potatoes with butter, cream, lemon, pepper, salt, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Potatoes Rechauffe

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the cold boiled potatoes.

  2. Place them in a chafing dish with butter and cream.

  3. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in lemon juice, pepper, salt, and beaten egg yolks.

  5. Let it simmer and serve hot.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  4. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. 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
Form the body of the dish, absorbing the rich cream sauce as they warm.
Butter
Adds fat and a rounded, savoury richness to the sauce.
Cream
Creates the rich sauce that coats the potatoes and carries the flavour.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream when gently heated and add richness and smoothness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat but scramble and turn grainy if the cream boils. Keep the heat low and stir steadily so the sauce becomes smooth rather than curdled.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cream, lemon, pepper, egg):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, lemon, pepper, egg. 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes