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Dessert

Sweet Potato Balls for Frying

Sweet potato balls made from mashed sweet potatoes, milk, lemon peel, sugar, salt, coated in breadcrumbs and egg yolks, then fried.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Sweet potato and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 314 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Balls for Frying

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the sweet potatoes until tender, then mash them.

  2. In a saucepan, boil the milk with lemon peel, sugar, and salt.

  3. Once the milk boils, remove it from heat and mix in the mashed potatoes to form a thick paste.

  4. Allow the mixture to cool, then shape it into balls.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat the balls with bread crumbs and egg yolks.

  2. Fry the balls until they are golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar sprinkled on top.

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 + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together314 recipes

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

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Provide the bulk and starchy body that holds the balls together.
Milk
Adds moisture and softness to the mashed potato paste.
Egg yolks
Bind the coating so bread crumbs stick and brown during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden outer crust when fried.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that complements the sweet potato.

The step that matters

Cooling the paste before shaping. A warm, soft paste is sticky and hard to shape, and it can break apart or tear the coating. Letting it cool firms the starch so the balls hold their form through coating and frying.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, milk, sugar, bread, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, milk, sugar, bread, egg. 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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