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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pone

A sweet potato cake baked with molasses, bacon grease, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pone

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the grated sweet potatoes with molasses, baking soda, salt, melted bacon grease or butter, flour, and ground spice.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased baking pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake slowly until well done and browned, about 45-60 minutes.

  2. Serve hot or cold, with gravy and meat or with milk and sugar.

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 + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Sweet potato + molassestop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 starchy bulk that gives the cake its dense, moist body.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and dark colour, and helps the cake brown during baking.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses acidity to help the cake rise and lighten.
Melted bacon grease or butter
Adds fat for moisture and a rich, tender texture.
Flour
Adds a small amount of structure to help hold the cake together.

The step that matters

Bake slowly until well done and browned. Sweet potato and molasses are dense and high in sugar, so the centre sets slowly and the surface browns quickly. Checking that the middle is fully cooked before removing the cake prevents a gummy, underbaked interior.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatothe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, butter, 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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