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Dessert

Sweet Potatoes

Preserved sweet potatoes cooked in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Sugar and sweet potato 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 ↓

Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and water together for 5 minutes to make a syrup.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and slice the sweet potatoes.

  2. Boil the sweet potatoes in slightly salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the sweet potatoes and cook them in the syrup for 5 minutes.

Jar and store

  1. Fill hot sterilized jars with the sweet potatoes and syrup, letting the syrup overflow.

  2. Adjust sterilized rubber rings and lids, then screw down tightly or fasten wire clamps.

  3. Store the jars away from drafts.

  4. Once cool, tighten the lids again.

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. Sugar + sweet potatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a syrup that sweetens the potatoes and preserves them.
Sweet potatoes
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and absorbing the sweet syrup.

The step that matters

Jarring with hot syrup and sterilized equipment. Filling hot, sterilized jars with the potatoes and syrup helps drive out air and keep spoilage organisms from growing, while tight lids and cooling create a seal. Careless handling can cause the jars to fail to seal.

“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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