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Dessert

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are candied with butter, lard, brown sugar, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash, peel, and cut sweet potatoes into lengthwise slices.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

Cook

  1. In a frying pan, heat butter and lard.

  2. Add sweet potato slices and stir to coat with fat.

  3. Sprinkle with brown sugar, cover, and cook slowly.

  4. Stir occasionally until potatoes are glossy and browned.

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft as they cook slowly in the pan.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it melts, forms a glossy syrup that caramelizes and browns the potatoes.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor and helps the potato slices brown in the pan.
Lard
Fat that coats the slices and conducts heat evenly, helping them brown without burning quickly.

The step that matters

Cook slowly and stir occasionally. Brown sugar burns quickly over high heat. Low, covered cooking softens the potatoes through, while occasional stirring spreads the melting sugar so it caramelizes into a glaze instead of scorching on the pan.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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