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Sweet Potatoes Boiled

Sweet potatoes boiled in water with salt, sugar, and lard or butter until browned in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,456 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place the peeled sweet potatoes in a pot.

  2. Add enough water to cover the potatoes, along with salt, sugar, and lard or butter.

  3. Bring to a boil and let the water evaporate, browning the potatoes in the syrup.

  4. If necessary, add a little more water during cooking.

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

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

  2. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sweet potato + potatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2 recipes

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

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 body of the dish, which softens as it cooks.
Sugar
Dissolves into the cooking liquid and caramelizes into a syrup that browns the potatoes.
Lard or butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the syrup coat and brown the potatoes.

The step that matters

Letting the water evaporate. As the water boils off, the sugar concentrates and caramelizes. If the water is gone too early, the sugar can scorch before the potatoes are tender. Adding a little water when needed keeps the syrup from burning.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, 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.

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