Name: Potato Balls
Ingredients: 2 cups mashed potatoes; 1 egg yolk; Coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Potato and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,978 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Potato Balls

Ingredients

2 cups mashed potatoes
1 egg yolk
Coarse sea salt (to taste)

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

Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
Mash the potatoes very nicely.

Shape and bake

Form the mashed potatoes into balls.
Rub the balls with the egg yolk.
Place the balls in the oven to brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + eggtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,978 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Mashed potatoes: Form the structure of the balls and provide the bulk of the dish.
Egg yolk: Coats the surface so the balls brown richly in the oven.

“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.