Name: Potatoes , Baked
Ingredients: large potatoes; cold butter

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 ↓

Potatoes , Baked

Ingredients

large potatoes
cold butter

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 and bake

Wash the potatoes with a scrubbing brush until the skin is clean.
Bake the potatoes at 400°F (200°C) for two hours.

Serve

Serve the potatoes in their skins wrapped in a napkin.
Provide a separate plate with cold butter for each person.

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

Large potatoes: Starchy flesh that turns fluffy when baked, while the skin crisps and holds it together.
Cold butter: Adds richness and moisture to the hot flesh as it melts over the potato.

“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.