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Sweet Potato Croquettes

Sweet potato croquettes are fried cakes made from mashed sweet potatoes, cream, and beaten egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Sweet Potato Croquettes

Why it works: Sweet potato and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 180 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Croquettes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Peel and boil the sweet potatoes in salted water until tender.

  2. Mash the sweet potatoes while warm and season with cream.

Shape the croquettes

  1. Add the beaten egg and whip until light.

  2. Allow the mixture to cool, then mold into small croquettes.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the croquettes in deep fat until golden brown.

  2. Garnish with parsley before serving.

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 + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Sweet potato + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together843 recipes

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

  5. Sweet potato + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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
Provide the starchy base that mashes into a soft, moldable mixture.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the mashed potato, keeping it smooth.
Beaten egg
Binds the mixture so the croquettes hold their shape when fried.

The step that matters

Allow the mixture to cool before shaping. Warm mashed sweet potato is soft and sticky, so it is hard to shape and may fall apart. Cooling firms the starches so the croquettes hold together when fried.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, egg, parsley):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, parsley. 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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