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Dessert

Sweet Potato Beignets En Surprise

Fried sweet potato slices soaked in rum, sugar, and lemon rind, then battered and glazed with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 314 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Beignets En Surprise

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil or steam the sweet potatoes until tender.

  2. Peel and cut them into ½-inch thick slices.

  3. Place the slices on a dish and cover with rum, sugar, and lemon rind for 1 hour.

Fry and finish

  1. Dip the slices in frying batter.

  2. Fry the slices in hot fat until golden brown.

  3. Drain on a baking sheet, sprinkle with castor sugar, and glaze with a hot salamander.

  4. 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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  2. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Rum + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 starchy, tender body that sits inside the crisp batter.
Rum
Adds aroma and flavour that soaks into the slices while they rest.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the slices and helps browning during frying and glazing.
Frying batter
Forms a golden, crisp coating that seals in moisture while frying.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. The fat must be hot enough to crisp the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the batter absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatothe original
  3. Capsicumfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rum, sugar, lemon. 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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