Name: Several Ways of Cooking Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients: raw sweet potatoes; sugar; butter; water; salt; cinnamon; nutmeg

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Several Ways of Cooking 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 and layer

Peel and slice the raw sweet potatoes into a baking dish.
Sprinkle each layer with sugar and bits of butter.

Cook

Cover with water and cook for three hours or more.
Brown in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

Mash and season

Boil the sweet potatoes, then mash them.
Season with sugar, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg.
Put in a baking dish, spread the top with butter, and brown.

Layer and bake

Take cold boiled sweet potatoes, cut into slices.
Layer in a baking dish, seasoning each layer with sugar, cinnamon, and plenty of butter.
Brown in the oven at 400°F (200°C).

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.

Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Sweet potato + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together539 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sweet potato + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together414 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).
Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together30,779 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,784 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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: Forms the bulk of the dish and gives it a soft, starchy body when cooked and mashed.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, and helps the top brown.
Cinnamon: Adds warm aroma and spice flavour.
Nutmeg: Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour.

“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.