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Dessert

Sweet Potato Balls

Sweet potato balls are baked layers of sweet potato and tart apple with butter, sugar, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Balls

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.

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes in their skins until tender, then slice.

  2. Pare and slice the tart apples.

Assemble

  1. In a deep buttered dish, layer the apple and sliced potato alternately.

  2. Add a little melted butter and a sprinkling of sugar between layers. Repeat layering until all ingredients are used.

  3. Pour the cream or rich milk over the top.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1 hour at 350°F (175°C).

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Sweet potato + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together133 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. 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
Form the bulk of the dish and become soft and creamy when cooked through.
Tart apples
Add acidity that balances the sweetness and keeps the layers moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and helping the layers brown slightly.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top caramelize and brown in the oven.
Cream or rich milk
Adds moisture and fat that set into a rich, custard-like texture as it bakes.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, sugar, cream. 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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