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Dessert

Glazed Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes glazed with a sugar‑butter syrup, baked until caramelized.

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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Scrub, rinse, and peel the sweet potatoes.

  2. Cook the potatoes in boiling salted water for 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the potatoes, cut them in halves lengthwise, and place them in a buttered pan.

Make the syrup

  1. Make the syrup by boiling the sugar and water for 3 minutes.

  2. Add the butter to the syrup.

Bake and glaze

  1. Pour half of the syrup over the potatoes and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes, basting 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 tender body of the dish, becoming soft and creamy when cooked.
Sugar
Dissolves into the water to make the syrup, which sweetens the dish and browns as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the syrup, giving the glaze a smooth, rounded flavor.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that can coat the potatoes evenly.

The step that matters

Bake and baste with the syrup. Basting twice with the remaining syrup builds a glossy glaze as the sugar caramelizes in the oven. Too little basting or too long a bake can leave the glaze sticky or scorched rather than shiny.

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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