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Creamed Potatoes

A dish of cooked potatoes topped with a white sauce made from flour, milk, fat, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Creamed Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the white sauce

  1. Make the white sauce by mixing 4 tablespoons flour with a little cold milk.

  2. Add the remainder of the milk and cook until it boils, stirring constantly.

  3. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of fat and 1½ teaspoons of salt.

Serve

  1. Pour the white sauce over the cooked potatoes, reheat, 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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

  2. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sauce + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + potatotop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth white sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the white sauce that coats the potatoes.
Potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish that the sauce is poured over.
Fat
Adds richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the sauce after adding the remaining milk. Flour must be stirred into cold milk first so it does not clump, then the mixture must be stirred constantly while it boils so the starch thickens evenly and the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, flour, milk. 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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