Name: Baked Sweet Potatoes
Ingredients: sweet potatoes; butter; pepper; coarse sea salt; sugar

Why it works: Sweet potato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,015 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Wash and scrape the sweet potatoes, then split them lengthwise.
Steam or boil the potatoes until nearly done, then drain them.

Bake

Place the potatoes in a baking dish.
Add lumps of butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt, then sprinkle thickly with sugar.
Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until nicely browned.

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.

Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,015 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,151 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Sweet potato + buttertop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,491 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 flesh that softens during cooking and becomes tender and sweet.
Butter: Adds fat and moisture that coats the flesh and helps the surface brown.
Sugar: Sweetens the surface and caramelizes in the oven, adding browning.

The step that matters

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until nicely browned. Sugar and butter brown and caramelize at high heat, but they can burn if left too long. Watch the color rather than relying only on time, and stop once the surface is nicely browned and the potato is tender.