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To Boil New Potatoes

Boiled new potatoes seasoned with coarse sea salt and optional melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Boil New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the new potatoes by removing loose skins with a coarse towel and cold water.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the cleaned potatoes in scalding water and cook for 20 to 25 minutes.

  2. Drain the water.

  3. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over the potatoes.

  4. Serve with melted butter if desired.

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. 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
Provide the starchy flesh that becomes tender and creamy when simmered whole.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour across the potato's mild surface.

The step that matters

Place the cleaned potatoes in scalding water and cook for 20 to 25 minutes. Starting in water that is already hot helps the potatoes cook evenly from the outside in. Cooking until just tender, checked by a knife or fork, keeps the flesh intact rather than letting it turn mushy and waterlogged.

“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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