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Sweet Potatoes Stewed As a Vegetable

A simple dish of sweet potatoes stewed with sugar, butter, flour, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and flour work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes Stewed As a Vegetable

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the sweet potatoes.

Stew

  1. In an enamelled saucepan, layer the sweet potatoes with sugar, butter, and flour.

  2. Pour the water over the last layer.

  3. Stew gently, stirring occasionally.

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 + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Form the bulk of the dish and soften into a tender, spoonable texture as they stew.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a syrupy sauce as the potatoes cook.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so it becomes a glossy, lightly body sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stewing gently and stirring occasionally. Flour thickens liquid best when heated gently and stirred, since high heat can scorch the sugar and sticking can form lumps. Gentle heat keeps the sauce smooth and the potatoes intact.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter. 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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