Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Potatoes Southern Style

Fried sweet potatoes coated in flour and sugar, a Southern-style dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Southern Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes well.

  2. Boil or steam the potatoes until tender, without peeling.

  3. Remove the peels from the potatoes.

Coat and fry

  1. Dredge the potatoes in flour and sugar.

  2. Fry the potatoes in butter until light 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. 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. Flour + sugartop 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
Provide the main body, moisture and natural sweetness of the fritters.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the outside crisp and brown during frying.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the coating brown in the pan.
Butter
Conducts heat for frying and adds richness and browning to the surface.

The step that matters

Fry in butter until light brown. Butter contains milk solids that brown and can burn quickly at high heat. Medium heat lets the coating crisp and the potato heat through before the surface darkens too much.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, 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 flour, sugar, 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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesSweet Corn PuddingSweet Corn Pudding8 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes