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For Best Mashed Potatoes

A simple mashed potato dish made with boiled potatoes, milk, salt, and butter or oleomargarine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

For Best Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Mash

  1. Peel the boiled potatoes.

  2. Mash and beat the potatoes until very light.

  3. Add salt, butter or oleomargarine, and hot milk.

Hold and brown

  1. If dinner is not ready to serve, pile the mashed potatoes lightly in a pan and set in the oven to brown.

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

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

  3. 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
Provide the starchy base that gives the mash its bulk and body.
Hot milk
Adds moisture and loosens the starch, giving a smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness, mouthfeel and flavour.

The step that matters

Mash and beat the potatoes until very light. Potato starch swells and releases when worked hard, so over-beating makes mash gluey and dense. Mash until smooth and fluffy, then stop, and add the warm liquid and fat gently.

“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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