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New Potatoes, a LA Creme

Creamed new potatoes with butter, cream, nutmeg, pepper, salt, lemon juice, served with croutons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

New Potatoes, a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the recently boiled new potatoes.

  2. In a stewpan, combine the potatoes, cream, butter, nutmeg, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  3. Heat on the stove, tossing well until mixed.

  4. Dish up with croutons and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and a silky coating that carries flavour over the potatoes.
Cream
Forms the sauce that clings to the potatoes and adds moisture and body.
New potatoes
Provide the starchy base of the dish, which absorbs the cream and butter as they warm.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the richness of the cream and butter.

The step that matters

Heating while tossing. Cream can curdle or scorch if it boils hard or sits still on direct heat. Gentle heat with constant tossing keeps the sauce smooth and coats the potatoes evenly.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, cream, nutmeg, pepper, lemon):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, nutmeg, pepper, lemon. 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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