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Honeyed Sweet Potatoes

Honeyed sweet potatoes are sliced boiled sweet potatoes coated with honey, pepper, sea salt, and butter, then baked until brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and pepper 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 ↓

Honeyed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Cut boiled sweet potatoes into thick slices.

  2. Dip the slices in honey and sprinkle with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Place them in a well buttered baking pan.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven 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. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

  2. Honey + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,327 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Sweet potato + honeytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Honey + peppertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,990 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. 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, soft body that becomes tender under the baking heat.
Honey
Adds sweetness and helps the surface turn brown and glossy in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps keep the pan surface from sticking.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, pepper, butter. 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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