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New Potatoes

Boiled new potatoes served with a sauce made from milk, flour, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Scrape the skins from the new potatoes and soak them in cold water for 1-2 hours.

  2. Boil the potatoes in a kettle covered with water for 30 minutes.

  3. Check doneness by piercing with a fork.

  4. Drain the water and let the potatoes stand for a few minutes.

Make the milk sauce

  1. Thicken milk with flour in a separate pan.

  2. Add butter, salt, and pepper to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the potatoes 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter 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
Provide the starchy base that the sauce coats and that makes up the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding creaminess and mild sweetness.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as its starch swells when heated.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the sauce, giving it a smoother mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Thicken milk with flour in a separate pan. Flour must be stirred into the milk and heated long enough for its starch to swell and thicken the sauce. Adding it lumpy or undercooked leaves a grainy, pasty sauce with a raw flour taste.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Potatothe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Chivefits less well
  4. Shallotfits less well

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