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Potato Balls

Potato balls are mashed potatoes mixed with butter, milk, salt, eggs, and flour, formed into balls and baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Potato Balls

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mash the potatoes very light with butter, milk, and coarse sea salt.

  2. Beat in the raw eggs.

  3. Put the mixture into a buttered saucepan and stir until hot and stiff.

  4. Turn out the mixture and let it cool.

Shape and roast

  1. Make the cooled mixture into balls and roll each in flour.

  2. Half an hour before serving the roast beef, pour off nearly all the gravy.

  3. Lay the potato balls around the meat in the roasting pan.

  4. Baste the balls whenever you baste the meat and cook until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Drain off the grease and serve the potato balls as a garnish for the beef.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the soft bulk of the balls once mashed.
Raw eggs
Bind the mashed potato so the balls hold their shape when set.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps browning.
Flour
Dry coating on the outside that helps the surface brown and crisp.

The step that matters

Stir until hot and stiff in the saucepan. Cooking the mashed potato and egg mixture over heat thickens it and drives off surface moisture. If it stays loose, the balls will not hold their shape and may fall apart in the roasting pan.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, milk, egg, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, milk, egg, flour. 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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