Name: A Sausage Stew
Ingredients: peeled potatoes; sausage; coarse sea salt; water; ham or butter (optional)

Why it works: Potato and ham work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 127 recipes. Both carry 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, which smells popcorn, roasted. The science ↓

A Sausage Stew

Ingredients

Directions

Layer and season

Slice the peeled potatoes and layer them in a pot.
Add a layer of sausage on top of the potatoes.
Continue layering potatoes and sausage until all ingredients are used.
Season with coarse sea salt.
Pour water over the layers.
If sausages are lean, add bits of ham or butter.

Cook

Cook until the potatoes are tender.

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.

Potato + hamtop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together127 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 soften into a tender, starchy base as they cook.
Sausage: Adds meaty flavour and fat that seasons the potatoes as the stew cooks.
Ham or butter: Adds extra fat and richness when the sausages are lean.

“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.