Name: New Potatoes
Ingredients: new potatoes; salt; green mint; 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 ↓

New Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

new potatoes
salt
green mint
butter

Directions

Prepare

Scrape and wash the new potatoes.

Cook

Boil salted water and add a few sprigs of green mint.
Cook the potatoes until done, then drain the water.

Serve

Serve in a hot vegetable dish with a small piece of butter rubbed over them.

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).
Potato + minttop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together363 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Mint + buttertop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,559 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

New potatoes: Form the main body of the dish, cooking to a tender, soft texture.
Butter: Adds richness and a glossy coating that carries flavour over the potatoes.
Green mint: Infuses the cooking water with a fresh, aromatic herbal flavour.