Skip to main content
Main

Bacon and Potatoes

A simple dish of bacon and cooked potatoes seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,305 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Bacon and Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the bacon in a pan until cooked, then remove and keep it warm.

  2. In the same pan, add more bacon fat if needed and fry the cold cooked potatoes, sliced or coarsely minced.

  3. Stir the potatoes until heated through, then transfer to a hot dish.

  4. Season with salt and pepper, place the bacon on top, and serve immediately.

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Provides savory flavor and fat that cooks the potatoes and crisps the dish.
Cooked potatoes
Form the bulk of the dish, browning in the fat as they heat through.
Bacon fat
Conducts heat and carries flavor, helping the potatoes brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Frying the potatoes in the fat. Potatoes need enough hot fat spread across the pan so they brown rather than steam. Crowding the pan or using too little fat leaves them soft and pale.

“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.

You might also like

Potato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipesSweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipes