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Sliced Sweet Potatoes

Baked slices of sweet potato coated with flour, sugar, butter, and 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 flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sliced Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes, then peel and cut them into ½ inch slices.

  2. Layer the slices in a pie tin.

Bake and serve

  1. Dredge with flour and sugar, add small lumps of butter, and pour in water.

  2. Brown in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  3. Serve hot.

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 + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 when boiled and baked.
Flour
Helps thicken the liquid that forms around the slices as they bake.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top surface brown in the oven.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the surface brown and giving flavour.

The step that matters

Browning in a hot oven. A hot oven at 400°F (200°C) is needed to brown the surface. Sugar and butter caramelise and brown only with enough dry heat, so the slices should be watched so they do not burn.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatothe original
  4. Leekfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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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