Name: Mashed Potatoes
Ingredients: 2 lbs potatoes; 2 oz butter; 1 oz butter (for topping); coarse sea salt (to taste)

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 ↓

Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients

2 lbs potatoes
2 oz butter
1 oz butter (for topping)
coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Prepare

Peel and cut the potatoes into small pieces.
Boil the potatoes until tender.

Mash and shape

Drain the potatoes and mash them.
Mix in 2 oz of butter with the mashed potatoes.
Shape the mixture in a mold or basin, then turn it onto a dish.

Top and serve

Cut 1 oz of butter into small pieces and place it over the potatoes.
Brown the dish before the fire and serve hot.

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

Potatoes: Form the bulk of the dish and, when mashed, give it a soft, fluffy body.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and a smooth, silky texture, and helps browning on top.

“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.