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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pudding

A baked sweet potato pudding with sugar, butter, wine, eggs, nutmeg, lemon rind, served in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then mash them until very smooth.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the mashed sweet potatoes, sugar, butter, wine, eggs, grated nutmeg, and lemon rind, and mix until well combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie crust.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Sweet potato + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  4. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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 filling, giving it body and a soft, moist texture.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the filling into a firm, sliceable custard.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a tender texture and smooth mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly at the edges.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set as they heat, so pulling the pie too early leaves a runny centre, while overbaking can make the custard grainy and cracked.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, wine, egg, nutmeg, lemon. 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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