Skip to main content
Main

Potatoes Stewed Whole

Whole potatoes stewed with butter, flour, lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, sugar, sweet oil, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potatoes Stewed Whole

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes in salted water until tender.

  2. In a stew pan, combine butter, flour, lemon peel, nutmeg, salt, sugar, and sweet oil.

  3. Add the boiled potatoes to the mixture.

Stew and finish

  1. Squeeze the juice of the lemon over the potatoes.

  2. Let them stew gently for about 10 minutes.

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 + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

New potatoes
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled and stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the stewing sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the buttery mixture so it clings to the potatoes.
Lemon
Provides bright acidity and aroma from both the grated peel and the juice.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to balance the lemon's acidity.

The step that matters

Adding the lemon juice. Acid added to a starch-thickened mixture can make it thin or curdle if stirred too hard or cooked too long. Adding the juice near the end and stewing gently keeps the sauce smooth and the flavour bright.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, lemon, nutmeg, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon, nutmeg, sugar. 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