Name: Baked Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients: sweet potatoes; fresh butter

Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

sweet potatoes
fresh butter

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

Wash the sweet potatoes in cold water and dry them.

Bake and serve

Place the potatoes in a 400°F (200°C) oven, turning them occasionally for even cooking.
When done, serve them on a napkin.
In the Southern States, serve in cups similar to egg cups.
Cut off the top, scoop out a teaspoonful, and replace it with a piece of fresh butter.

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.

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, sweet flesh that becomes soft and creamy when baked.
Fresh butter: Adds richness and moisture to the hot potato flesh as it melts.

“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.