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Stewed Potatoes, Bretonne Style

A savory stew of sliced onions, butter, flour, broth, wine vinegar, and boiled new potatoes, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Stewed Potatoes, Bretonne Style

Ingredients

Directions

Make the onion sauce

  1. In a saucepan, lightly fry the sliced onions in butter.

  2. Add the flour and cook for 5 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon.

  3. Slowly add the broth and wine vinegar, then let it simmer until the onions are well cooked.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the sliced and boiled new potatoes, season with salt and pepper, and warm thoroughly 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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Wine + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

Onions
Soften and turn sweet as they cook, forming the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while frying the onions.
Flour
Cooked in the butter, it thickens the broth into a sauce.
Broth
Forms the liquid that becomes the sauce and moistens the potatoes.
Wine vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sauce.
New potatoes
Provide the starchy bulk, absorbing the sauce as they warm through.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in butter. Flour must cook for several minutes in the fat so its raw starchy taste fades and it thickens smoothly. Adding broth too quickly can cause lumps, so pour it in slowly while stirring.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, wine, vinegar, potato, pepper. 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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