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 in Butter
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Peel, wash, and dry the potatoes.
Cook
Combine the potatoes and butter in a well-tinned stewpan or saucepan.
Add salt when the potatoes begin to stew.
Simmer over low heat for about 30 minutes, shaking or tossing occasionally.
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.
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Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Form the body of the dish, cooking until tender in the butter.
- Butter
- Gently cooks the potatoes and adds richness and a silky coating.
The step that matters
Simmer over low heat. Low heat lets the potatoes cook through in their own moisture and butter without scorching the fat, which would turn the butter brown and bitter.
“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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