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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Wash and dry the potatoes, place them in the oven and bake until done. Very nice with roast pork or beef.
About as terse as a recipe gets, and the omissions are the interesting part: no temperature, no time, no size of potato. Here is what fills the gaps.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names none. In practice a sweet potato bakes well anywhere in the range a roast would occupy, around 375-425F; at 400F a medium sweet potato takes 45-60 minutes, larger ones closer to an hour and a quarter.
- Judging "until done"A skewer or knife should slide through the thickest part with no resistance, and the skin should have begun to weep sugary syrup. Undercooked sweet potato tastes starchy rather than sweet, since the starch-to-sugar conversion happens slowly as the flesh heats.
- Pierce before bakingThe instruction to wash and dry is here, but not the one that matters: prick each potato several times with a fork. A sealed sweet potato can burst in the oven, and the vents also let steam escape so the flesh bakes rather than steams.
- Line the rackThe sugars that leak out carbonise on the oven floor. A sheet pan or a strip of foil beneath the potatoes saves an unpleasant scrub.
- What was meant by the nameIn American books of this period "sweet potato" covers both the pale, dry-fleshed varieties and the orange, moist ones sold today as "yams" (they are not yams). The dry-fleshed sort bakes fluffier and drier.
- YieldOne medium potato per person as a side, two if they are small. Serve split lengthways with butter and salt.
Baking whole in the ashes or the oven is the oldest and least interfering way to cook a sweet potato, and it is the one that gets the most out of the vegetable: held between roughly 135 and 170F on its way up to temperature, an enzyme in the flesh breaks starch down into maltose, which is why a slow-baked sweet potato tastes far sweeter than a boiled one. The pairing suggested here is with roast pork or beef -- not the holiday dish smothered in marshmallow, which came later, but a plain starch alongside the roast. Sweet potatoes were generally cheap, and they are said to have stored well through winter in a dry cellar and to have grown readily across the South and mid-Atlantic, which would have kept them on the table long after fresher vegetables had given out for the season.