Name: Boiled New Potatoes
Ingredients: New potatoes; Coarse sea salt; Melted butter or cream sauce

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 ↓

Boiled New Potatoes

Ingredients

New potatoes
Coarse sea salt
Melted butter or cream sauce

Directions

Prepare

Wash the new potatoes in cold water.
Rub them with a coarse towel to remove the skin.

Boil and serve

Place the potatoes in a saucepan filled three-quarters with cold water.
Add a little coarse sea salt and bring to a boil.
Once cooked, drain the potatoes and serve with melted butter or cream sauce.

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

New potatoes: Form the main body of the dish; their waxy flesh holds its shape when boiled.
Melted butter or cream sauce: Adds richness and moisture to the cooked potatoes.

“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.