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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pudding

A baked dessert made with sweet potatoes, butter, powdered sugar, eggs, nutmeg, lemon peel, brandy, and topped with sugar and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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.

Make the filling

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until half done, then skin and grate them.

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  3. Add the beaten eggs, grated nutmeg, lemon peel, and brandy to the mixture.

  4. Combine the grated sweet potatoes with the mixture and pour into a pastry crust.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until done.

  2. Once baked, sprinkle the top with sugar and cover with bits of citron.

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. Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Butter + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,127 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the bulk and body of the pudding once grated into the filling.
Butter
Creamed with sugar to add richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps cream the butter into a light base.
Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set into a firm, custard-like pudding when baked.

The step that matters

Grating and combining the sweet potatoes. Potatoes boiled only until half done still need to cook through in the oven, so the batter must be evenly mixed and the oven time followed until the pudding is fully set.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatothe original
  4. Chivefits less well

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