Name: Scalloped Potatoes
Ingredients: potatoes; sweet milk (enough to cover potatoes); butter or cream (for seasoning); salt (to taste)

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Scalloped Potatoes

Ingredients

potatoes
sweet milk (enough to cover potatoes)
butter or cream (for seasoning)
salt (to taste)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Peel and slice the potatoes as you would for frying.
Place the sliced potatoes in a baking pan and cover with sweet milk.
Add butter or cream for seasoning.

Bake

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until nearly done.
Stir in salt to taste and finish baking.

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.

Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,611 recipes

Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).
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

Potatoes: Form the bulk of the dish, becoming tender as they bake in the milk.
Sweet milk: Cooks the potatoes gently and forms the creamy sauce around them.
Butter or cream: Adds richness and fat, giving the sauce a smoother, mellower flavour.

“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.