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Dessert

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Candied sweet potatoes are sweet potatoes cooked with water, sugar, butter, and cinnamon until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the sweet potatoes.

  2. Place the sliced sweet potatoes in a baking dish.

  3. Add 2 cups of water, 1 cup of sugar, 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter, and 1 teaspoon of cinnamon.

Cook and brown

  1. Cover the baking dish and cook until nearly done.

  2. Remove the cover and brown the potatoes.

  3. If cooking uncovered, baste the potatoes like you would meat.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + cinnamontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  4. Sweet potato + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,151 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 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
Form the main body of the dish and soften into tender pieces as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps the syrup caramelize and brown on the surface.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the syrup and helps it coat the potatoes.
Water
Forms the syrup with the sugar and keeps the potatoes moist while they cook.

The step that matters

Remove the cover and brown the potatoes. Sugar darkens and caramelizes only when the surface is dry and hot enough. If the dish stays covered too long, the syrup stays thin and the potatoes steam rather than brown.

“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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