Skip to main content
Main

New Potatoes, a LA Creme

A creamy potato dish with butter, cream, lemon, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare

  1. Slice the boiled new potatoes.

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

Cook and serve

  1. Add the sliced potatoes and set to boil on the stove.

  2. Toss the mixture well together.

  3. Dish up with croutons.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + potatotop 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

Cream
Forms the rich sauce that coats and flavours the potatoes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture.
New potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish, absorbing the cream sauce as they cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and butter.

The step that matters

Add the sliced potatoes and set to boil on the stove. Cream boiled with potatoes can scorch on the bottom or separate if heated too hard. Keep the heat gentle once it simmers and stir so the potatoes cook evenly in the sauce without the cream breaking.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, butter, 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 cream, butter, 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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes