Name: Pommes De Terre Au Lard
Ingredients: 4 slices of bacon; ½ tablespoon flour; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 bunch parsley; 1 teaspoon thyme; 1 bay leaf; 2 cups stock or water; 4 large potatoes, washed and peeled

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Pommes De Terre Au Lard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Fry the bacon slices until done.
Add flour to the bacon and stir constantly to color it.
Mix in pepper, salt, parsley, thyme, and bay leaf. Moisten with stock or water and let it boil for five minutes.

Cook and serve

Add the raw potatoes, cut into pieces if large.
Fry the potatoes until cooked, then skim the fat off the sauce 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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,585 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Thyme + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,586 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon: Renders fat for frying and adds savory, smoky flavor to the sauce.
Flour: Stirred into the bacon fat to color it and thicken the sauce.
Potatoes: Form the body of the dish, absorbing the sauce and becoming tender as they cook.
Stock: Forms the liquid base of the sauce that carries the seasonings.

The step that matters

Coloring the flour in the bacon fat. Flour must be stirred constantly so it toasts evenly without scorching. Scorched flour turns bitter, while properly browned flour gives the sauce a deeper color and nutty flavor and helps it thicken.

Swap the potato

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

Shallotfits better
Parsnipfits better
Carrotfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, parsley, thyme. 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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Pommes De Terre Au Lard