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Dessert

Carolina Sweet Potato Pudding

A sweet potato pudding baked in pastry with wine, brandy, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry ethyl benzoate, which smells fruity, sweet. The science ↓

Carolina Sweet Potato Pudding

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 the filling

  1. Place the sliced sweet potatoes in a saucepan and cover with water.

  2. Add allspice, wine, brandy, and sugar to taste.

  3. Boil until the potatoes are soft.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare a puff or plain pastry and line a deep dish with it.

  2. Pour the sweet potato mixture into the lined dish.

  3. Cover with a top layer of pastry and bake at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

  4. For the second version, mix boiled sweet potatoes, sugar, butter, wine, rose water, mixed spice, and beaten eggs.

  5. Bake in puff pastry without a top crust at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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 + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  2. Wine + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Potato + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together298 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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 filling and give the pudding its body and sweetness.
Eggs
Set the mixture into a custard-like texture when baked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, smoother texture.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky crust that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Boil the potatoes until fully soft. Potatoes that are not cooked through stay firm and grainy, so the filling will not mash smoothly or set evenly in the bake.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, allspice, wine, brandy, sugar, butter, rose):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, allspice, wine, brandy, sugar, butter, rose. 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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