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Dessert

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes are parboiled, baked with butter, sugar, optional cinnamon, and hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 539 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and parboil the sweet potatoes, cut in halves lengthwise.

  2. After 10 minutes of boiling, drain and place in a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Spread thickly with butter and sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon if desired.

  2. Add a few spoonfuls of hot water and bake until tender, basting often with the sauce in the pan.

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 + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together539 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 soft and tender as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the potatoes brown and carry the sweet glaze.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and caramelizes in the pan juices, forming a glossy glaze.

The step that matters

Basting often while baking. Spooning the pan sauce over the potatoes keeps their surfaces moist and lets the sugar and butter caramelize into a glaze rather than drying or burning.

“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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