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Baked Sweet Potatoes

Baked Sweet Potatoes are boiled, sliced, layered with butter, sugar, lemon, and salt, then baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Baked Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Sweet potato and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 314 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

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.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel and slice each potato lengthwise into three pieces.

Layer and bake

  1. Place a layer of potato slices in a buttered baking dish.

  2. Sprinkle with sugar, add small pieces of butter, lemon juice, and salt.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until slightly browned.

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. Sweet potato + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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, becoming soft and tender after boiling and baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top surface brown in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and helping the top brown.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the potatoes.

The step that matters

Bake until slightly browned. Sugar and butter brown in the oven, but over-baking can dry the potatoes and burn the sugar, so watch for light browning rather than dark color.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

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