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Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes boiled, fried with butter, sugared, and baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Sweet Potatoes

Why it works: Sweet potato and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,151 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until done.

  2. Drain the potatoes.

  3. Peel them while hot.

Fry

  1. Heat a skillet.

  2. Add enough butter to fry the potatoes.

  3. Lay the potatoes in the skillet.

  4. Sprinkle lightly with sugar.

Bake and serve

  1. Place in the oven and bake.

  2. Turn once or twice to brown evenly.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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, soft body that becomes tender when boiled and then baked.
Butter
Adds fat for frying, helping the potato surfaces brown and carrying rich flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the surface caramelize and brown in the pan and oven.

The step that matters

Turn once or twice to brown evenly. Browning depends on direct contact with hot surfaces, so uneven heat or contact leaves pale and dark patches. Turning lets every side brown, and sugar on the surface can scorch if one side sits too long.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Leekfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar. 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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