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Mashed Potatoes

Mashed potatoes made with potatoes, coarse sea salt, hot milk, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel the potatoes and soak them in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Boil the potatoes in plenty of salted water until a fork easily penetrates the largest one.

  3. Drain the potatoes and dry them thoroughly.

Mash and serve

  1. Mash the potatoes with a fork or split spoon until powdery.

  2. Mix in hot milk with melted butter and salt to taste, beating until creamy.

  3. Transfer to a hot, deep dish, leaving the top rough.

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. 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

Potatoes
Starch provides the bulk and fluffy, absorbent body of the mash.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the mashed potatoes.
Hot milk
Liquid loosens the mash and, with the butter, makes it creamy.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the potatoes thoroughly. Surface water left on the boiled potatoes dilutes the mash and makes it gluey or soggy. Drying lets the starch stay fluffy when mashed and absorb the milk and butter evenly.

“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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