Name: Sweet-potato Cobbler
Ingredients: mashed sweet potatoes; biscuit dough or similar crust; water; drawn butter or hard sauce

Why it works: Sweet potato and biscuit share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet-potato Cobbler

Ingredients

mashed sweet potatoes
biscuit dough or similar crust
water
drawn butter or hard sauce

Directions

Prepare the mashed sweet potatoes as for sweet-potato pie.
Fill a dish with alternate layers of biscuit dough and sweet potato.
Roll out the dough quite thin and spread with the sweet-potato mixture in layers about ½ inch thick.
Add just enough water to each layer to achieve a peach cobbler-like consistency.
Bake until thoroughly done and serve hot with drawn butter or hard sauce.

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.

Sweet potato + biscuittop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together21 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,009 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,491 recipes

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