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Dessert

Sweet Potato Pone

A baked sweet potato cake made with molasses, lard, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Potato Pone

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix the grated sweet potatoes with molasses, dissolved baking soda, salt, lard, flour, and whole spice.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered baking pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake slowly until done and quite brown.

  2. Serve hot with roast meat or with milk and sugar.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Molasses + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,429 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Sweet potato + molassestop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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
Provide the bulk and body of the pudding as they bake and soften.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark colour and a rich, caramel-like flavour as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to lighten the texture and help the pone rise slightly.
Lard
Adds fat for moisture and a tender crumb while helping the surface brown.
Flour
Helps bind the grated sweet potato so the mixture holds together when baked.

The step that matters

Bake slowly until done and quite brown. Low heat gives the sweet potato and molasses time to cook through evenly, while sugars and starches slowly caramelise and brown. Baking too hot can scorch the surface before the centre sets.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, butter, 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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