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Vienna Potatoes

Creamy potato dish with diced baked potatoes, thin cream, flour, butter, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Vienna Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the cold baked potatoes, removing all brown parts, and cut them into dice.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Heat the thin cream in a saucepan.

  2. Mix the flour and butter until smooth.

  3. Add the flour-butter mixture to the hot cream.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and cayenne.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the diced potatoes.

  2. Stir carefully until all potatoes are covered with cream.

  3. Let stand on the stove until heated through.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Cold baked potatoes
Form the body of the dish and absorb the cream sauce while heating.
Thin cream
Provides the liquid base and richness that coats the potatoes.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a light sauce that clings to the potatoes.
Butter
Adds fat and smoothness, and combines with flour to form a roux.

The step that matters

Adding the flour-butter mixture to the hot cream. If the flour-butter mixture is added to cream that is not hot enough, the starch will not swell properly and the sauce may stay lumpy or thin. Stirring it in smoothly while the cream is hot lets the starch thicken evenly.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Spinachfits about as well
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatothe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

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