Name: Baked Potatoes
Ingredients: 2 dozen potatoes; fresh butter

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 ↓

Baked Potatoes

2 dozen potatoes

Ingredients

2 dozen potatoes
fresh butter

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Wash the potatoes and select those that are similar in size.
Place the potatoes on a baking pan.

Bake and serve

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven, turning occasionally.
Once done, serve the potatoes wrapped in a napkin with fresh butter on the side.

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.

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 starchy flesh that becomes fluffy and soft when baked.
Fresh butter: Adds richness and moisture to the potatoes when served on the side.

“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.