Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are boiled, peeled, baked with butter or beef drippings until browned and served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

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. Boil sweet potatoes with their skins on until partially cooked.

  2. Peel the sweet potatoes and place them in a baking dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until browned, basting with butter or beef drippings several times.

  2. Serve hot.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the starchy flesh that softens and sweetens as it cooks and browns.
Butter or beef drippings
Add fat and moisture to the surface, promoting browning and rich flavor.

The step that matters

Bake until browned. Basting with fat during baking helps the surface brown through the Maillard reaction, which builds flavor. Partial boiling first softens the flesh so it cooks through in the oven without drying out.

“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

Sweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesPotato ChipsPotato Chips53 recipes