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Dessert

Sweet Potato Cakes

Sweet potato cakes are fried cakes made from mashed sweet potatoes, milk, butter, eggs, and coated in cracker dust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cakes

  1. Mash the warm sweet potatoes and rub through a fine colander.

  2. Stir in the milk, butter, salt, and sugar.

  3. Whip in the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  4. Form the mixture into flat cakes using floured hands.

Coat and chill

  1. Dip each cake into the frothed egg whites, then coat with cracker dust.

  2. Place the cakes on a platter and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Fry

  1. Fry the cakes in deep, boiling lard until golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 moist, starchy body of the cakes.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the mixture; frothed whites help the coating adhere.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the mashed potato base.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Cracker dust
Forms a crisp, golden coating that browns during frying.

The step that matters

Fry in deep, boiling lard. The fat must be hot enough to brown the coating quickly. If it is too cool, the cakes absorb grease and turn heavy and soggy instead of crisp and golden.

Swap the sweet potato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, sugar, egg, 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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