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Fried Potatoes with Eggs

A dish of sliced boiled potatoes fried in butter and mixed with beaten eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Fried Potatoes with Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the cold boiled potatoes.

  2. Fry the potatoes in good butter until brown.

  3. Beat 1 or 2 eggs in a bowl.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir the eggs into the potatoes just before serving.

  2. Do not leave the mixture on the fire after adding the eggs to prevent them from hardening.

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).

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled potatoes
Provide the main body of the dish; cold potatoes hold their shape better when sliced and fried.
Good butter
Fat that carries the frying heat and gives the potatoes a golden-brown surface and rich flavour.
Eggs
Set with gentle heat to bind the potato slices together into a tender, cohesive mixture.

The step that matters

Stop the heat once the eggs go in. Egg proteins set and toughen when overheated, so leaving the mixture on the fire after adding the eggs can make them hard and rubbery instead of soft.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg. 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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