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Sweet Potato Delight

A baked sweet potato dish with coconut, nuts, and marshmallows.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Coconut and sweet potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 159 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Delight

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Cook the potatoes

  1. In a saucepan, add the sliced sweet potatoes, cover with sugar and water, and cook until tender.

Layer and bake

  1. Layer the cooked potatoes, shredded coconut, and nuts in a dish.

  2. Add the syrup from the cooked potatoes and cover with marshmallows.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until golden brown.

  4. Serve in the dish it was cooked in.

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. Coconut + sweet potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together159 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Coconut + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Nuts + sweet potatotop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + sweet potatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the tender, starchy base layer of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the potatoes and syrup, and helps the top brown in the oven.
Shredded coconut
Adds chewy texture and toasty flavor as it bakes.
Marshmallows
Melt and brown on top, adding sweetness and a golden crust.
Nuts
Add crunch and roasted flavor against the soft potatoes.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, coconut, sweet potato):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Almondfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, coconut, sweet potato. 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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