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New Potatoes Creamed with Cheese

A creamy side dish of new potatoes, milk, butter, flour, and cheese.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

New Potatoes Creamed with Cheese

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes unpeeled until tender.

  2. Peel the potatoes when cool enough to handle.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Place the potatoes in a pot with 1½ cups milk over low heat.

  2. In a separate bowl, cream the butter and flour together until smooth.

  3. Add the butter-flour mixture to the milk and stir until thickened.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in salt, paprika, and grated cheese.

  5. 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Butter + cream cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,747 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

New potatoes
Provide the starchy body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled and absorbing the sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that thickens around the potatoes.
Butter and flour
Together form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Cream cheese
Adds richness and a tangy, creamy texture to the sauce when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with the butter-flour mixture. Stirring the butter and flour into warm milk over low heat lets the starch swell gradually, giving a smooth sauce. Adding flour directly to hot liquid without a fat-blended paste can cause lumps.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Asparagusfits less well
  4. Shallotfits less well

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