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Sweet Potatoes

Sweet potatoes baked with sugar, butter, and seasoning until the skin separates and syrup condenses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Sweet Potatoes

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 ↓

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. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Wash and slice the sweet potatoes.

  3. Parboil the slices if desired.

  4. Place the sweet potato slices in a baking dish.

Season and bake

  1. Add sugar, butter, and seasoning to taste.

  2. Bake for about 1 hour, until the skin separates from the pulp and the syrup condenses.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 bulk of the dish; their starch turns partly to sugar as they bake, softening and sweetening the flesh.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the juices thicken into a syrup and brown at the edges.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carries flavour, and helps the surface brown and glaze.

The step that matters

Bake until the skin separates and the syrup condenses. Sugar and butter can scorch if the heat is too high or the dish is left too long, while underbaked potatoes stay starchy. Checking that the flesh is fully tender and the juices have reduced to a syrup shows the starch has converted and the sugars have concentrated.

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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