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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pudding

A baked sweet potato custard made with butter, eggs, cream, sugar, spices, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream 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 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. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, combine the mashed sweet potatoes and softened butter.

  3. Add the eggs, cream, and sugar, mixing until smooth.

  4. Stir in spices and wine to taste.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

  2. Serve with your choice of 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.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 pudding and give it a soft, dense body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that makes the texture tender and smooth.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the custard-like texture silky.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly at the edges.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Underbaking leaves the pudding runny in the centre, while overbaking can make it dry and curdled, so watch for a firm edge and a slight wobble in the middle.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Potatofits about as well
  2. Asparagusfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

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