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Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Escalloped Sweet Potatoes is a baked dish of mashed sweet potatoes mixed with peanut cream, eggs, zwiebel, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pass the well-boiled sweet potatoes through a colander.

  2. In a bowl, combine the sweet potatoes, peanut cream, beaten eggs, zwiebel, and salt. Mix well and transfer to a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until nicely 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.

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. Cream + eggtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Sweet potato + eggtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together843 recipes

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

  5. Sweet potato + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together301 recipes

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

Cream and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it a soft, starchy body.
Peanut cream
Adds moisture and richness so the mixture bakes soft rather than dry.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it bakes, holding the dish together.

The step that matters

Baking until nicely browned. The eggs need enough heat to set the mixture, but overbaking dries the sweet potato and peanut cream, so watch for the browned top rather than baking longer than needed.

Swap the peanut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pecansfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, cream, egg. 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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