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Browned Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes browned in drippings after boiling and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sweet potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Browned Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes.

  2. Dry the boiled sweet potatoes in the oven.

  3. Remove the skins from the sweet potatoes.

  4. Cut the sweet potatoes in half.

Brown and serve

  1. Heat the drippings in a large frying pan.

  2. Dust the potatoes with salt, pepper, and sugar.

  3. Place the potatoes in the hot fat and turn carefully until browned on both sides.

  4. Serve very hot.

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. Pepper + sweet potatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + sweet potatotop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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
Provide the starchy body of the dish, which softens when boiled and browns on the cut surface.
Drippings
Supply hot fat that conducts heat evenly and promotes browning and rich flavor on the potato surface.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the potato surface brown more deeply in the hot fat.

The step that matters

Place the potatoes in the hot fat and turn carefully until browned on both sides.. The fat must be hot before the potatoes go in. A hot, dry surface allows browning reactions to develop a crust, while cool or crowded fat lets the potatoes steam and turn pale and soft. Turning gently keeps the browned crust intact.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar. 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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