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Potatoes and Bacon

A stew of potatoes and bacon cooked in butter or sweet dripping with flour, stock, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and garlic are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,517 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Potatoes and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the bacon and cut it into half‑inch dice.

  2. Wash and peel the potatoes, then slice them into ¼ inch thick pieces.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, heat the butter or sweet dripping and add the bacon.

  2. Brown the bacon lightly.

  3. Stir in the flour until well mixed, then add the hot water or stock and bouquet garni with garlic.

  4. Cover the stewpan and bring to a boil.

  5. Add the potatoes to the stewpan, cover, and boil until cooked.

  6. Remove the seasoning and serve.

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 + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Potato + clovetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the stew and thicken its body as their starch softens during boiling.
Bacon
Adds salty, smoky flavour and fat that carries flavour through the stew.
Butter or sweet dripping
Provides fat for browning the bacon and adds richness to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the flour. Flour must be fully mixed into the hot fat before liquid is added; otherwise it clumps and forms lumps instead of thickening the stew evenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, butter, flour, garlic):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, butter, flour, garlic. 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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