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To Brown Potatoes

A dish of boiled and fried potatoes browned in hot fat and seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,355 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Brown Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes and remove the skins.

  2. Flour the potatoes well and place them under the roasting meat, ensuring they are dry from the drippings before serving.

  3. For fried potatoes, peel and cut them into rings about 1/8 inch thick or slice them continuously like a mushroom.

  4. Soak the cut potatoes in cold water, then drain on a cloth.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the potatoes quickly in plenty of hot fat until golden, then drain and sprinkle with salt.

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 + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,355 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 and, once fried, provide a crisp golden crust over a soft interior.
Flour
Coats the potato surface so it browns more evenly and crisps during cooking.
Hot fat
Conducts heat quickly into the potatoes, drying the surface and producing golden browning.

The step that matters

Fry the potatoes quickly in plenty of hot fat. Potatoes that are wet or fried in cool fat absorb grease and turn soggy instead of browning. Drying the cut pieces and using plenty of hot fat keeps the surface crisp and golden.

“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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