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Dessert

Potato Pone

A sweet potato cake baked with eggs, butter, sugar, milk, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and ginger work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Potato Pone

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

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes well and grate them.

  2. In a bowl, combine the grated sweet potatoes, eggs, butter, sugar, milk, and ginger. Mix until well combined and the mixture is soft.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  2. Serve hot with butter or, when cold, slice and fry.

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 + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together306 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Sweet potato + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together596 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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, sweet body that gives the pone its dense, moist texture.
Eggs
Bind the grated mixture and help it set firm as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and softens the crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface brown during baking.
Milk
Loosens the mixture so it bakes moist rather than dry.
Powdered ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice that flavours the sweet potato.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Grated sweet potato holds a lot of water, and the eggs set only once the mixture is heated through. Baking until the centre is firm, not just the edges, keeps the pone from being wet or sunken in the middle.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerthe original
  4. Parsleyfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, egg, butter, sugar, milk. 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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