Skip to main content
Dessert

Baked Sweet Potatoes

A sweet potato dish baked with butter, sugar, and cream or milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Baked Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweet potatoes

  1. Parboil or steam sweet potatoes until nearly done.

  2. For yams, steam until tender, then peel and slice.

Bake

  1. Place the sweet potatoes in a roasting pan with a roast of beef or pork to finish cooking.

  2. Layer the yams in a buttered pudding dish, sprinkling each layer with bits of butter and 2 teaspoons of sugar.

  3. Pour 1 cup of cream or milk over the layers and bake 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

  3. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and tender as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top brown as the dish bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface caramelize and brown in the oven.
Cream or milk
Adds moisture and richness, softening the layers as they bake.

The step that matters

Baking until brown. Browning depends on sugar and fat reacting under dry oven heat. Pulling the dish too early leaves the top pale and the layers wet, while overbaking can dry out the cream.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesSweet Corn PuddingSweet Corn Pudding8 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes