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Bread

Sweet Potato Corn Bread

A bread made from sweet potatoes and cornmeal, baked in a skillet or tin pan.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,491 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Corn Bread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until soft.

  2. Mash the hot sweet potatoes with the lard or butter.

  3. Mix in enough sifted cornmeal to form a stiff dough.

  4. Add water gradually to achieve a soft dough.

Rise and bake

  1. Let the dough rise for three hours or longer.

  2. Bake in a skillet or a tin pan.

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 + 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
Add moisture and sweetness, and make the dough tender and soft.
Lard or butter
Adds fat, which tenderises the crumb and gives a richer flavour.
Cornmeal
Provides the main structure and body of the dough.

The step that matters

Add water gradually to achieve a soft dough. Cornmeal absorbs liquid at different rates depending on how finely it is ground and how moist the potatoes are. Adding water a little at a time lets you stop once the dough is soft enough, avoiding a dough that is too wet to hold its shape or too dry to bind.

“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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