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Sweet Potatoes, Spanish Style

Fried sweet potato slices cooked in clarified butter, served on a napkin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Sweet Potatoes, Spanish Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Let them cool.

  3. Peel the cooled sweet potatoes.

  4. Slice them into ¼-inch thick slices.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat clarified butter in a frying pan.

  2. Add a layer of sweet potato slices to the pan.

  3. Fry until golden on both sides.

  4. Drain the fried potatoes.

  5. Serve on a napkin.

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 + 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 main body and starchy, sweet flavour of the dish.
Clarified butter
Fries the slices and browns their surfaces while adding rich, nutty fat flavour.

The step that matters

Fry until golden on both sides. Sweet potato slices brown at the surface before the centre heats through, and the sugars caramelise quickly. Too much heat burns the outside while the inside stays cool; moderate heat with a single layer gives even golden colour.

“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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