Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweet Potato Pudding

A baked sweet potato custard made with grated sweet potatoes, eggs, sugar, milk, flour, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sweet potato and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 539 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Pudding

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grate the sweet potatoes and place them in a bowl.

Make the custard

  1. In another bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar, salt, and flavoring.

  2. Add the flour mixed with a little milk to the egg mixture.

  3. Combine the sweet potatoes with the egg mixture and add the quart of milk to thin it out.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

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 + cinnamontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together539 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cinnamon + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 bulk and body of the pudding, with starch that softens and sets as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a firm, sliceable custard when baked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the earthy flavor of the sweet potatoes.
Flour
Thickens the custard slightly and helps it hold together as it sets.
Milk
Adds moisture and creaminess, thinning the batter so it bakes evenly.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set when heated to roughly 160°F, so the pudding must bake until the center is firm, not just the edges. Underbaking leaves a loose, watery custard, while overbaking can make it curdle or dry out.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Sweet potatothe original
  2. Arrowrootfits about as well
  3. Beetrootfits less well
  4. Capsicumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, cinnamon, flour, milk. 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.

More sweet potato pudding recipes

Carolina 3 See all 116 →

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipes