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Baked Sliced Sweet Potatoes

Sliced sweet potatoes are baked with butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Sliced Sweet Potatoes

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

  1. Steam the sweet potatoes.

  2. Peel the sweet potatoes.

  3. Slice the sweet potatoes lengthwise.

Bake and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a square baking pan until lightly browned.

  2. Arrange the sweet potato slices in the pan and sprinkle with sugar, salt, and pepper.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for a few minutes.

  4. Just before serving, pour the cream over the potatoes to moisten.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender, moist texture when steamed and baked.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns lightly in the pan for a nutty flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the potatoes and helps them caramelize and brown in the oven.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness to the potatoes just before serving.

The step that matters

Melt the butter until lightly browned. Butter that is browned gives a nutty flavor, but it can burn quickly. Removing it at the first light golden color keeps it from turning bitter before the potatoes go in.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, pepper, cream. 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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