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Mash Potatoes

A simple dish of boiled potatoes mashed with butter and milk or cream.

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 ↓

Mash Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the potatoes

  1. Steam or boil the potatoes in salted water until soft.

  2. Drain the potatoes and let them dry completely.

Mash and finish

  1. Sprinkle with salt and mash the potatoes.

  2. Melt a piece of butter in hot milk or cream.

  3. Pour the milk or cream mixture onto the mashed potatoes and stir until light and fluffy.

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
Provide the starch and bulk that form the body of the mash.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Hot milk or cream
Adds moisture so the mash turns creamy rather than stiff.

The step that matters

Drain and dry the potatoes completely. Surface water dilutes the mash and makes it gluey or loose. Letting the potatoes steam dry lets the liquid evaporate so the liquid you add is absorbed and the texture stays fluffy.

“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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