Skip to main content
Dessert

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes glazed with a sugar‑butter syrup after boiling and baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Wash and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Cook in boiling salted water for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain and cut the potatoes in half lengthwise.

  4. Place the potatoes in a buttered pan.

Glaze and bake

  1. Make a syrup by boiling the sugar and water for 3 minutes; add the butter.

  2. Brush the potatoes with the syrup and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes, basting twice with the remaining syrup.

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. Sugar + buttertop 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 when boiled and then baked.
Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup and caramelizes in the oven, giving sweetness and a glossy browned glaze.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the syrup, giving a smoother, more flavorful glaze.

The step that matters

Basting the potatoes with the syrup. Basting twice in the oven builds up a glaze as the syrup thickens and caramelizes. Brushing too little leaves the glaze thin and dull, while the sugar can burn if the oven runs too hot.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  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 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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesSweet Corn PuddingSweet Corn Pudding8 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes