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Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes glazed with a sugar‑butter syrup and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,151 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Glazed 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 the potatoes

  1. Wash and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Cook the potatoes in boiling salted water for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the potatoes, cut them in half lengthwise, and place them in a buttered pan.

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, boil the sugar and water for 3 minutes to make a syrup.

  2. Add the butter to the syrup and mix well.

Glaze and bake

  1. Brush the potatoes with the syrup and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes, basting twice with the remaining syrup.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the starchy, soft body of the dish that the glaze coats.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it caramelize and brown in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the syrup, giving a smoother, glossier glaze.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can form a syrup that thins for basting.

The step that matters

Basting the potatoes with the syrup. Basting twice during baking builds a glossy, sticky layer as the syrup thickens and caramelizes on the surface. Brushing too little or letting the syrup burn can leave the glaze dull or bitter.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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