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Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Layered sweet potato slices baked with butter, salt, pepper, sugar, 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 or cracker crumbs, wetting them with cream.

  3. Dot the coating with bits of butter and dust with salt and 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 that the sauce settles into.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps the top brown.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface take on colour as it bakes.
Bread crumbs or cracker crumbs
Form a crisp, browning crust over the top layer.
Cream
Moistens the crumbs and adds liquid richness that softens the potatoes.

The step that matters

Bake covered, then check the browning. Covering traps steam so the potatoes cook through evenly, while the crumb topping needs direct dry heat to brown. Judging when the top is golden matters because the cream can make the dish look done before the potatoes are tender.

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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