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Sweet Potatoes

A baked mash of boiled sweet potatoes mixed with sweet cream and salt, finished with butter.

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

Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel the sweet potatoes.

  3. Pass the peeled potatoes through a coarse sieve.

Make the mash

  1. Add sweet cream and salt to the mashed potatoes.

  2. Beat the mixture well.

Bake

  1. Transfer the mash to a buttered pan.

  2. Dot the surface with butter.

  3. Bake until brown.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Sweet potato + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 and starchy body of the mash, setting the texture once cooked and mashed.
Sweet cream
Adds moisture and richness, loosening the mash into a smooth, spoonable texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the surface brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Pass the potatoes through a coarse sieve. Pressing cooked potato through a sieve breaks its starch cells apart, giving a smooth mash without lumps. Pushing the potato while it is still warm makes this easier and more even.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Onionfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, butter. 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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