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Sweet Potatoes

Fried sweet potato slices coated in a seasoned batter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Sweet Potatoes

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until almost tender, then remove the skins.

Make and coat

  1. In a bowl, make a batter with a little milk, the beaten egg, flour, and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Cut the potatoes into thick slices and dip them in the batter.

Fry

  1. Brown the battered slices on both sides in hot beef drippings.

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.

  1. Sweet potato + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

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

  4. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Form the main body of the fritter, becoming soft and creamy when cooked through.
Flour
Mixes with the egg and milk to form a batter that coats the slices and crisps when fried.
Beaten egg
Binds the batter so it clings to the potato slices during frying.
Beef drippings
Conducts heat to brown the batter and adds savoury flavour to the fritters.

The step that matters

Brown the battered slices in hot drippings. The fat must be hot enough to set and brown the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat, turns greasy and may slide off before it crisps.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, flour, pepper, beef. 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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