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Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

A baked dish of sliced sweet potatoes layered with butter, salt, pepper, sugar, bread crumbs, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. 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

  1. Parboil the sweet potatoes, then peel and slice them crosswise.

Assemble

  1. Pack the slices in layers in a pudding dish, seasoning each layer with butter, coarse sea salt, black pepper, and a little sugar.

  2. Cover the top thickly with bread crumbs, wet them with cream, and dot with bits of butter.

  3. Dust the top with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Bake

  1. Bake covered at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes until brown.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sweet potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the soft, starchy body of the dish once parboiled and layered.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and helps the top brown in the oven.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on top when moistened and baked.
Cream
Moistens the crumbs and bakes into a rich, saucy layer around the potatoes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the potatoes caramelize slightly while baking.

The step that matters

Bake covered, then check for browning. Baking covered first keeps the cream from drying out while the potatoes soften. The top needs to brown, so it must be checked near the end of the bake time to avoid underbaking or scorching.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sugar, bread, 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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