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Sweet Potato Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 36 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, combine the diced sweet potatoes, chopped peanuts, and grated onion.

  2. Add the Cream Sauce No. 1 and mix well.

  3. Serve the salad on a bed of lettuce.

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 + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Peanut + lettucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Sweet potato + peanuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Peanut + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,043 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, peanut, cream, sauce, lettuce):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, peanut, cream, sauce, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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