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Boiled Sweet-potatoes

Boiled sweet potatoes are cooked until tender, peeled, and buttered.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Sweet-potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes.

  2. Boil them without peeling.

  3. Boil until you can pierce them with a straw.

  4. Remove from heat.

Finish

  1. Peel the potatoes.

  2. If large, cut them in half lengthwise.

  3. Place in a covered dish and pour melted butter over them.

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 + 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 starchy flesh that becomes soft, tender and sweet when boiled.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the potatoes for a smooth, glossy finish.

The step that matters

Boil until you can pierce them with a straw. Cooking must continue until the starch gelatinizes and the flesh softens throughout. Undercooked potatoes stay firm in the centre, while overcooking makes them waterlogged and mushy.

“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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