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Baking

Sweet Potatoes, Scalloped

A baked dish of sliced sweet potatoes layered with butter, breadcrumbs, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes, Scalloped

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then peel and slice them crosswise.

Assemble and bake

  1. In a buttered baking dish, layer the sweet potato slices, sprinkling each layer with breadcrumbs, bits of butter, and a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Make the top layer thick with breadcrumbs and dot generously with butter.

  3. Cover and cook for 20 minutes, then uncover and brown the top.

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 + 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 bulk of the dish, setting into soft, sliceable layers as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top brown as it melts into the crumbs.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp topping that absorbs melted butter and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Uncovering to brown the top. Covered cooking traps steam so the sweet potatoes cook through. Uncovering lets the surface dry, so the breadcrumbs and butter brown through the Maillard reaction. Leaving the cover on too long leaves the top pale and soft.

“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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