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Dessert

Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style

A baked sweet potato dish with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, and buttered bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil sweet potatoes with skins on until tender.

  2. Let them cool, then peel and slice lengthwise.

Assemble

  1. Place slices in a deep baking pan.

  2. Mix the slices with coarse sea salt and butter.

  3. Sprinkle thickly with brown sugar and cinnamon.

  4. Pour 1 cup of water into the pan.

  5. Add a layer of buttered bread crumbs.

Bake

  1. Bake until transparent.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Sweet potato + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together67 recipes

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

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 casserole, becoming soft and tender after boiling and baking.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a syrupy, caramelized coating on the potatoes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and helps the topping brown.
Buttered bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping that contrasts with the soft potato layers.

The step that matters

Bake until transparent. Baking long enough lets the sugar and butter melt into a syrup and the potatoes soften fully. Underbaking leaves the potatoes firm and the sauce thin, while overbaking can dry the dish.

“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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