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Baked Sweet Potatoes

Baked sweet potatoes are boiled, mashed, sweetened, buttered, and baked until lightly browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Baked Sweet Potatoes

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 ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Boil the potatoes until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Drain the water and mash the potatoes well.

Sweeten and shape

  1. Sweeten to taste and mix in 1 tablespoon of butter.

  2. Transfer to a round pan or bowl and smooth the top.

Bake

  1. Place a lump of butter on top and bake until lightly browned.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + sugartop 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
Provide the bulk and starchy body that makes up the mash.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the top brown in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the earthy flavour of the potato.

The step that matters

Boil the potatoes until thoroughly cooked. Starch in the potato only becomes soft and smooth when fully cooked through. Undercooked potato stays firm and lumpy, so the mash will not blend evenly even with thorough mashing.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  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 butter, sugar. 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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