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Dessert

Sliced Sweet Potatoes

Baked sweet potato slices with sugar, butter, nutmeg, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 414 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Sliced Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

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

  1. Boil sweet potatoes until tender, then peel and slice them.

  2. In a pan, layer the sliced potatoes.

Layer and bake

  1. Sprinkle each layer with sugar, bits of butter, nutmeg, and a little flour.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of boiling water.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until brown and 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 + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together414 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the bulk of the dish, providing starchy body and natural sweetness as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and caramelizes on the surface, helping the top turn brown.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and keeping the slices moist as they bake.
Flour
Thickens the cooking juices between the layers, helping them set into a light sauce.
Nutmeg
Adds warm aroma that pairs with the sweetness of the potatoes and sugar.

The step that matters

Bake until brown. Sugar and butter brown quickly and can scorch before the potatoes are heated through. Watch the color closely, since the surface browns faster than the centre warms.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits about as well
  2. Sweet potatothe original
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Parsnipfits about as well

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