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Dessert

Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

A baked dish of sliced sweet potatoes layered with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and parboil the sweet potatoes.

  2. Slice them crosswise.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the slices in a buttered baking dish, sprinkling each layer with sugar, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and bits of butter.

  2. Cover with ½ cup of cream and bake until golden.

  3. For a richer flavor, use plenty of butter instead of cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, 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, with slices that soften and hold their layered shape.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the top brown during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface caramelize and turn golden.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, creating a silky sauce as the dish bakes.

The step that matters

Parboil the sweet potatoes. Parboiling partly cooks the starch before baking, so the slices become tender throughout rather than staying firm in the center while the top browns.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

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