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Sweet Potato Balls

A fried sweet potato ball made with mashed sweet potatoes, butter, egg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Sweet Potato Balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine hot riced or mashed sweet potatoes, butter, salt, pepper, and beaten egg.

  2. If the mixture is too dry to shape, add a little hot milk.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll the mixture into balls and coat them in flour.

  2. Fry the balls in deep fat until golden brown, then drain on brown paper.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 and moisture that give the balls their soft, tender interior.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, softening the texture of the mash.
Beaten egg
Binds the mixture so the balls hold their shape when rolled and fried.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the outside brown and crisp in the fat.

The step that matters

Adding hot milk only if needed. The mash must be just moist enough to shape; too much liquid makes the balls slack and prone to breaking apart in the hot fat, while dryness makes them crumble.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, egg, milk, flour. 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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