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Roast Opossum, and Sweet Potatoes

Roasted opossum served with sweet potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Roast Opossum, and Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dress and place the whole opossum in a large pan with 6 quarts of cold water.

  2. Boil the opossum until tender, then drain.

Roast

  1. Place the opossum in a covered roaster and surround it with peeled and boiled sweet potatoes.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Put the roaster in the oven until both the opossum and sweet potatoes are crisp and 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.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Opossum
Boiling first softens the meat, then dry oven heat browns and crisps its surface.
Sweet potatoes
Their starch softens when boiled and their natural sugars brown in the oven for sweetness and color.

The step that matters

Boil the opossum until tender, then drain.. Boiling breaks down tough connective tissue in the meat. If it is not fully tender before roasting, the dry oven heat will only dry and toughen the surface rather than producing a tender interior.

“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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