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Dessert

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are sliced, layered with butter and sugar, then boiled in salted water for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,151 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Cut them lengthwise into very thin slices.

Layer and cook

  1. Layer the slices in a baking dish, covering each layer with sugar and small pieces of butter.

  2. Add salt to the boiling water.

  3. Pour the salted water over the potatoes.

  4. Cook on low heat on the stove for three hours or more.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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
Form the bulk of the dish, softening into tender layers as they cook slowly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the potatoes and carrying flavor through the layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the potatoes and, as it dissolves, helps form a thick, glossy syrup.

The step that matters

Cook on low heat for three hours or more. Low, slow heat lets the starches soften fully and the sugar and butter melt into a syrup without scorching. High heat can burn the sugar on the bottom of the dish before the potatoes are tender.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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