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Potatoes with Parsley

Boiled potatoes cooked with butter, flour, vinegar, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potatoes with Parsley

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a stew pan.

  2. Add the flour and let it brown slightly.

Cook the potatoes

  1. Add the potatoes and pour enough boiling water to cover them.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. When the potatoes are done, add the chopped parsley and vinegar.

  2. Cook for 5 minutes 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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 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. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Potatoes
Form the main body of the dish, cooking until tender in the liquid.
Flour
Browns in the butter and thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce.
Butter
Carries the flour's browning and adds richness to the dish.
Vinegar
Adds a sharp acidity that brightens the starchy potatoes and butter.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour needs only a slight browning in the butter. Cooking it too far turns it bitter, while stopping too early leaves a raw floury taste and weak flavor in the sauce.

Swap the potato

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

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

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