Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓
Sweet Potato Pudding
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
Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then peel and mash them with the milk.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar to make a custard.
Combine and bake
Mix the mashed sweet potatoes into the custard, then add the butter.
Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.
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.
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Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Sweet potato + milktop 15% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together596 recipes
Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).
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Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,151 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 recipes
Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together98,233 recipes
Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, 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 bulk and soft, starchy body of the pudding.
- Eggs
- Coagulate when heated, setting the custard into a sliceable structure.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavour of the eggs and potato.
- Butter
- Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender mouthfeel.
- Milk
- Adds moisture and loosens the mashed potato into a pourable mixture.
The step that matters
Bake until set. The eggs thicken the mixture as they heat. Underbaking leaves the pudding runny, while overbaking can make the eggs curdle and turn the texture grainy.
Swap the sweet potato
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, sugar, butter):
- Potatofits about as well
- Sweet potatothe original
- Asparagusfits about as well
- Capsicumfits about as well
Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, sugar, butter. 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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