Name: Sweet Potatoes Sliced
Ingredients: Sweet potatoes; ½ cup butter; ½ cup sugar

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 ↓

Sweet Potatoes Sliced

Ingredients

Sweet potatoes
½ cup butter
½ cup sugar

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

Steam the sweet potatoes until tender.
Carefully remove the skin.
Cut the sweet potatoes into longitudinal slices, ¼ inch thick.

Make the syrup and serve

In a saucepan, combine equal parts butter and sugar and boil together to make a syrup.
Pour the syrup over each slice as you place it in the dish.

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.

Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,151 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
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 main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender after steaming.
Butter: Adds richness and a silky texture to the syrup that coats each slice.
Sugar: Sweetens the dish and, when boiled with butter, thickens into a syrup.