Name: Ham and Potatoes
Ingredients: 1 slice of ham, soaked to extract salt; 4-5 potatoes, peeled and diced

Why it works: Ham and potato work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 127 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

Ham and Potatoes

Ingredients

1 slice of ham, soaked to extract salt
4-5 potatoes, peeled and diced

Directions

Cut the ham into thick pieces, similar to the potatoes.
In a saucepan, combine the ham and potatoes.
Fry for 15-20 minutes, covering the saucepan while cooking.

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.

Ham + potatotop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together127 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Provide starch that softens and becomes tender as they cook through, giving the dish its body.
Ham: Adds savoury, salty flavour and some fat that is released into the pan as it fries.

“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.