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Dessert

Sweet Potato Short Cake

A sweet potato cake made by mashing sweet potatoes, mixing with flour, butter, milk, and seasoning, then baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Short Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Remove the skin from the sweet potatoes and mash them nicely.

  2. Mix in the flour, salt, pepper, butter, and enough warm milk to form a dough.

  3. Roll out the dough on a floured surface and cut it into a shape that fits your baking tin.

Prepare the tin and bake

  1. Butter the baking tin and sprinkle a little flour over it before placing the dough inside.

  2. If the oven bottom is very hot, place a grate under the baking tin to prevent burning.

  3. To avoid burning, cut the dough into biscuit shapes about 2 inches thick instead of one large cake.

  4. Cover while baking to keep the cakes moist.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Provide the bulk and moisture that make the dough soft and tender.
All-purpose flour
Gives the mashed potato dough structure so it holds its shape when cut.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender texture.
Milk
Adds moisture so the mashed potato and flour come together into a dough.

The step that matters

Cover while baking. Covering traps steam around the dough, keeping the surface from drying out so the cakes stay moist rather than hard.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, pepper, butter, milk. 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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