Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Potatoes Boiled

Sweet potatoes boiled with coarse sea salt and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potatoes Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Boil

  1. Wash the sweet potatoes thoroughly.

  2. Cook the sweet potatoes with the skins on in salted boiling water until easily pierced with a fork.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the skins from the sweet potatoes.

  2. Place a piece of butter on each potato.

  3. Set the potatoes in a 350°F (175°C) oven for a moment and serve.

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 + 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, moist flesh and natural sweetness that make up the whole dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, melting into the warm flesh for a smooth, flavourful finish.

The step that matters

Cooking until easily pierced. Potatoes must be cooked through so the starch gelatinizes and the flesh turns soft and fluffy. Undercooked centres stay firm and chalky, while overcooked potatoes turn watery and fall apart.

“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

Sweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesRoasted Sweet PotatoesRoasted Sweet Potatoes62 recipes