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Dessert

Potato Muffins

A baked dish of mashed potatoes mixed with eggs, milk, butter, salt, baking powder, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Potato Muffins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Boil and mash the potatoes.

  2. Add salt and butter, and beat well.

  3. Incorporate the beaten eggs, milk, and baking powder.

  4. Sift in enough flour to achieve a medium batter.

Cook

  1. Bake on a greased griddle in rings over medium heat.

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and moist, starchy body of the muffin batter.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the muffins rise and turn light.
Flour
Gives the batter enough structure to hold its shape while cooking.

The step that matters

Sift in enough flour to achieve a medium batter. Too much flour makes the muffins dense and stiff, while too little leaves them loose and fragile. Judging the batter's consistency by eye keeps the texture right before it hits the griddle.

Swap the potato

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

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

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