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Canned Sweet Potatoes

A preserved sweet potato dish canned by boiling, seasoning with salt and sugar, and vacuum‑sealing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Canned Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the sweet potatoes.

  2. Boil them in slightly salted water until tender.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the potatoes in jars, adding a sprinkle of sugar and salt if desired.

  2. Put on the rubbers and screw the covers on loosely.

Steam

  1. Place the jars in a pan of water and steam for 4 hours one day or 1 hour for three successive days.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the main body and starchy texture, and their natural sugars give the sweet flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the packed potatoes.

The step that matters

Steaming the sealed jars. Sweet potatoes are low in acid, so they need sustained heat to destroy microbes that survive ordinary cooking. Steaming for the full stated time, on the schedule given, is what makes the jars safe to store.

“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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