Name: Fried Potato
Ingredients: 1 slice of salt pork; cold boiled potatoes, chopped into dice

Why it works: Pork and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,668 recipes. Both carry sotolon, which smells curry, maple. The science ↓

Fried Potato

Ingredients

1 slice of salt pork
cold boiled potatoes, chopped into dice

Directions

Fry the slice of salt pork in a skillet until crisp and brown.
Remove the pork from the skillet.
In the remaining grease, fry the chopped cold boiled potatoes until heated through.
Optionally, chop the fried pork and add it to the potatoes before serving.

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.

Pork + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,668 recipes

Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Salt pork: Renders fat for frying and browns to add savory, crisp bits.
Cold boiled potatoes: Form the base of the dish, turning tender inside and lightly browned outside when fried.

“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.