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Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Mashed sweet potatoes with peanut cream and sea salt, baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and peanut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Mashed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes thoroughly and remove any bad spots.

  2. Boil the sweet potatoes with the skins on until tender.

Mash and season

  1. Remove the skins and mash the potatoes, or pass them through a colander.

  2. Season with peanut cream and coarse sea salt to taste.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a pudding dish and bake until nicely browned.

  2. Serve warm.

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 + peanuttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

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

  2. Peanut + creamtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together490 recipes

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

  3. Sweet potato + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together301 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, sweet body of the dish once cooked and mashed.
Peanut cream
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the mash brown in the oven.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peanut, 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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