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Dessert

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Glazed sweet potatoes are boiled, sliced, and baked with a sugar‑butter syrup.

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

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Wash and peel the sweet potatoes, then parboil them for 10 minutes.

  2. Drain the potatoes, cut them in half lengthwise, and place them in a buttered baking pan.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan to make a syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup for 3 minutes.

  3. Add butter to the syrup.

Bake and glaze

  1. Pour half of the syrup over the potatoes.

  2. Bake until soft, about 15 minutes.

  3. Baste twice with the remaining syrup.

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

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 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
Form the bulk of the dish, becoming soft and tender when parboiled and baked.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps it caramelize and brown on the potatoes.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it forms a syrup that can coat the potatoes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the syrup, giving the glaze a smoother, rounder flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup for 3 minutes. Boiling concentrates the sugar and water into a thicker syrup. A syrup that is too thin will run off the potatoes instead of clinging to them and glazing as it bakes.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  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 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.

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