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To Boil New Potatoes

Boiled new potatoes seasoned with coarse sea salt and optional fresh butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Boil New Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select new potatoes of equal size and scrub them clean with a brush or coarse cloth.

Boil and season

  1. Place the potatoes in boiling water without adding salt and boil gently until tender.

  2. Drain the water completely and sprinkle coarse sea salt over the potatoes.

  3. Shake the saucepan gently and let the potatoes sit by the fire for one minute.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately, optionally tossing with a small slice of fresh butter after it melts.

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. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

New potatoes
Provide the starchy flesh that becomes soft and fluffy when boiled.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smooth coating of fat, optionally, once the potatoes are hot.

The step that matters

Boil gently without salt until tender. Gentle simmering cooks the potatoes evenly without breaking their skins, while the salt is held back until after draining so it seasons the surface rather than the water. Vigorous boiling can split the skins and leave the centres unevenly cooked.

“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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