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Sweet Potato Curry

A curry of sweet potatoes simmered in butter and soup stock, seasoned with curry powder, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown

  1. Peel the sweet potatoes and cut them into 1-inch dice.

  2. Sprinkle the diced potatoes with curry powder and brown them in butter over medium heat.

Simmer

  1. When the potatoes are half cooked, season with salt and pepper.

  2. Cover the potatoes with soup stock and boil until tender.

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. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

  2. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the bulk of the dish, turning soft and starchy as they cook through.
Butter
Carries the curry powder and helps the potato surfaces brown.
Curry powder
Supplies the spiced aroma and flavour that defines the dish.
Soup stock
Cooks the potatoes gently and forms the liquid base of the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the potatoes in butter. Browning over medium heat with the curry powder toasts the spices and caramelises the potato surfaces, building flavour. Too high a heat can scorch the butter and spices before the potatoes cook through.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper. 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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