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To Boil New Potatoes

Boiled new potatoes seasoned with coarse sea salt and optional butter.

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 ↓

To Boil New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select new potatoes of equal size and scrub them clean with a brush or coarse cloth.

  2. Place the potatoes in boiling or very hot water without adding salt.

Cook and season

  1. Boil gently until tender, about 10 to 20 minutes depending on size.

  2. Drain the water completely and sprinkle coarse sea salt over the potatoes.

  3. Shake the saucepan to distribute the salt and let the potatoes sit by the fire for 1 minute.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, optionally tossing with a small slice of fresh butter before serving.

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

New potatoes
Starchy flesh that turns soft and fluffy when boiled, forming the body of the dish.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating of fat that carries flavour across the potato surface.

The step that matters

Drain the water completely before salting. Water left on the potatoes dilutes the salt and keeps the surface wet, so the seasoning does not cling well and the skins can taste watery.

“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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