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Candied Sweet Potatoes

Candied Sweet Potatoes are sweet potatoes cooked in a sugar syrup and baked with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Steam potatoes until tender, then peel them.

  2. Slice potatoes and place them in a baking pan.

Add the syrup and butter

  1. Cover potatoes with syrup made from sugar and water.

  2. Add a heaping tablespoon of butter and place small bits of butter on top.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for one and a half hours, basting with syrup to keep them moist.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Potatoes (in the method)
Their starch softens when steamed and baked, giving a tender, yielding texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, dissolved in water, forms a syrup that glazes the potatoes.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps keep the potatoes moist as they bake.

The step that matters

Basting with syrup during the bake. Basting keeps the potatoes moist over the long bake and lets the syrup coat them as it thickens. If the surface dries out, the sugar can scorch before the potatoes are tender.

“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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