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Dessert

Sweet Potatoes

A baked sweet potato dish sweetened with sugar, butter, cinnamon, and topped with almonds, walnuts, and marshmallows.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Boil sweet potatoes as you would Irish potatoes.

  2. Drain and mash the sweet potatoes.

  3. Season with sugar, butter, and a little cinnamon or your preferred spice.

Bake

  1. Transfer to a baking pan.

  2. Sprinkle the top with ground almonds and bits of butter.

  3. For a variation, add walnuts, Sherry wine, and raisins before baking.

  4. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned.

  5. Top with marshmallows for a lovely meringue.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sweet potato + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together539 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Almond + walnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together993 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Sweet potato + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together62 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Cinnamon + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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 casserole, providing starchy body and natural sweetness when mashed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the top brown.
Ground almonds
Form a toasted, nutty topping layer that adds texture and browning.
Marshmallows
Melt and brown on top, creating a soft, sweet meringue-like crust.

The step that matters

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned. Mashed sweet potato is already cooked, so baking is mainly for browning the surface. Sugars and proteins brown through the Maillard reaction, and the marshmallows can scorch quickly if the oven runs hot, so watch closely.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, sugar, butter, cinnamon, almond, sherry, wine):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Chickpeafits better
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, sugar, butter, cinnamon, almond, sherry, 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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