Skip to main content
Side

Sour Potatoes

A side dish of potatoes simmered in beef drippings, onion, flour, and water, seasoned with salt and lemon.

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

Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sour Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Heat the beef drippings in a pan until very hot.

  2. Add the chopped onion and cook until browned.

  3. Stir in the flour to thicken the mixture.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the cubed potatoes and enough water to cover them.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and boil until the potatoes are tender.

  3. Serve with lemon juice to taste.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Beef + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,092 recipes

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

  3. Beef + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Flour + potatotop 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

Beef drippings
Provides fat for frying the onion and adds rich, savory flavor.
Onion
Browns in the fat to add savory, sweet depth to the dish.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid as it mixes with the fat and water.
Potatoes
Become tender as they boil, forming the body of the dish.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, onion, flour, potato):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, onion, flour, potato. 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.

You might also like

Onion PuddingOnion Pudding9 recipesEggplant CakesEggplant Cakes34 recipesEscalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)Escalloped Tomatoes (Scalloped Tomatoes)25 recipesParsnip CroquettesParsnip Croquettes12 recipes