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Baked Potato Dice

Roasted diced potatoes baked with butter, salt, pepper, lemon, and onion juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Baked Potato Dice

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and cut the potatoes into dice or strips half an inch thick.

  2. Soak the potatoes in cold water for 30 minutes.

  3. Drain and wipe the potatoes, then coat them in melted butter.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the remaining butter into a baking dish and arrange the potatoes irregularly.

  2. Sprinkle with salt, pepper, lemon juice, and onion juice.

  3. Cover the dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes or until tender.

  4. Serve dry on a hot dish.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish, becoming tender and fluffy when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the potato pieces brown and carry seasoning.

The step that matters

Drain and wipe the potatoes before coating them in butter. Surface water left on the cubes dilutes the butter and steams the potatoes instead of letting the fat coat them evenly, so drying them well helps the butter cling and the surfaces brown.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, pepper, onion. 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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