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Baked Stewed Potatoes, with Cream, Chadwice Style

A baked potato dish with cream, cream sauce, and spices, finished in a buttered dish until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,015 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Baked Stewed Potatoes, with Cream, Chadwice Style

Ingredients

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 the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then cut them into pieces a quarter of an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick.

Make the creamed potatoes

  1. In a saucepan, combine the potato pieces with cream, salt, red pepper, and nutmeg.

  2. Cook until the cream is reduced, then add the cream sauce and toss well.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a buttered baking dish and bake at 400°F (200°C) until nicely browned.

  2. Wipe the edge of the dish and serve with a napkin.

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 + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  3. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish that softens and holds the creamy sauce.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, and reduces to a thick coating around the potato pieces.
Cream sauce
Adds extra body and richness, helping the potatoes turn creamy and cohesive.

The step that matters

Reducing the cream before baking. If the cream is not reduced enough, the potatoes will be wet and loose in the dish. Cooking it down thickens it so it clings to the potatoes and can brown properly in the oven.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, pepper, nutmeg, sauce, butter):

  1. Spinachfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pepper, nutmeg, sauce, butter. 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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