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Potato Nuts

Small boiled or fried potato balls seasoned with salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Potato Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Pare raw potatoes and cut them into balls with a vegetable cutter.

  2. Soak the potato balls in cold water.

  3. Drain and boil the potatoes in salted water for 5 minutes.

  4. Skim them out, drain, and dry the potatoes.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat plenty of butter in a skillet, add the potatoes, and shake them around.

  2. Place the skillet in a 400°F (200°C) oven to brown the potatoes.

  3. Salt and serve.

  4. Alternatively, cook in boiling lard, drain, salt, and serve.

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. 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

Raw potatoes
Provide the starchy body that becomes crisp on the outside and soft inside when cooked.
Butter
Conducts heat to the potato surface and adds richness and browning.
Lard
Serves as a hot frying fat alternative that browns the potato balls and adds richness.

The step that matters

Drying the potatoes before browning. Surface moisture cools the fat and turns the frying into steaming, so the potatoes brown poorly. Thorough drying lets the hot fat crisp the surface.

“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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