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Dessert

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Candied sweet potatoes baked with butter, brown sugar, and boiling water until tender.

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 ↓

Candied Sweet Potatoes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweet potatoes, then peel them.

  2. Place the potatoes in a baking pan that just fits them.

Bake and serve

  1. Add butter, brown sugar, and boiling water to the pan.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until the potatoes are tender and light brown.

  3. Baste with the syrup every 15 minutes.

  4. Serve hot with the syrup poured over the potatoes.

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. Butter + sugartop 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 main body of the dish, becoming tender and soft when baked.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the potatoes brown as it caramelizes in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the syrup coat the potatoes and carry flavor.

The step that matters

Basting with the syrup every 15 minutes. Regular basting keeps the potato surfaces moist and spreads the sugary syrup over them, so the sugar caramelizes evenly instead of drying out or scorching in patches.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar):

  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 butter, sugar. 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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