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Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes baked with butter, sugar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Escalloped Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Slice the sweet potatoes.

  2. Sprinkle the sliced sweet potatoes with salt and pepper.

  3. Butter a large, shallow dish.

  4. Spread the sliced sweet potatoes in the dish, making a layer no more than 1 inch thick.

Make the butter mixture

  1. Melt the butter in the boiling water.

  2. Add the sugar to the melted butter.

  3. Sprinkle ¼ of the liquid over the potatoes.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the dish in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  2. After 10 minutes, sprinkle another ¼ of the liquid over the potatoes.

  3. Repeat the sprinkling twice more at 10-minute intervals.

  4. After the last sprinkling, bake for an additional 10 minutes.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

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

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 tender and soft as they bake.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, helping the potatoes brown and carry flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top surface brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Repeated sprinkling of the butter liquid. Adding the liquid in portions at set intervals keeps the potatoes moist as they bake. Pouring it all at once would leave some pooled at the bottom while the top dries out.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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