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Pried Sweet Potatoes

A dish of boiled, sliced sweet potatoes seasoned, floured, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pried Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil sweet potatoes until soft enough to pierce with a fork.

  2. Peel and let them cool.

  3. Slice the cooled sweet potatoes.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.

Fry

  1. Dredge with flour.

  2. Fry in hot lard until golden 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 + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, sweet body of the dish once boiled and sliced.
Flour
Forms a light coating that crisps and browns when fried in lard.
Lard
Conducts heat for frying and gives the coating its golden, crisp finish.

The step that matters

Frying in hot lard. If the lard is not hot enough, the flour coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp. Hot fat seals the coating quickly so it browns before the potato overcooks.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour. 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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