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Mashed Sweet Potatoes

A dish of boiled sweet potatoes mashed with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim the roots off the sweet potatoes and wash them.

  2. Boil the potatoes in a pot of water for 30 minutes.

Mash and serve

  1. Remove the potatoes, peel them, and place them in a warm bowl.

  2. Mash the potatoes with a potato masher.

  3. Add the butter in small pieces and continue mashing until smooth.

  4. 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 + 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
Provide the starchy base that mashes into the dish's main body and texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, making the mash smoother and more flavorful.

The step that matters

Mashing in the butter until smooth. Cold butter added to hot potatoes is best added in small pieces so it melts and emulsifies evenly, and continued mashing breaks up lumps so the texture becomes smooth rather than grainy.

“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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