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Fried Sweet Potatoes
Parboil the potatoes until nearly done. Slice and sprinkle with sugar. Fry in hot fat and send to the table hot.
TOMATOES A LA CRÊME.
Peel and slice fine ripe tomatoes, one quart of fresh ones or a pound can, stew until perfectly smooth, season with salt and pepper, and add a piece of butter the size of an egg; just before taking from the fire, stir in one cup of cream, with a tablespoonful of flour stirred smooth in a part of it; do not let it boil after the flour is put in. Have ready in a dish pieces of toast, pour the tomatoes over this and serve.
Two short vegetable recipes share this page: sugared fried sweet potatoes and a creamed tomato dish served over toast. Both assume a cook who knows her stove and needs no numbers, so here are the numbers.
- Parboil, then chillFor the sweet potatoes, boil whole in their skins until a knife meets slight resistance, roughly 15-20 minutes for medium ones, then cool before slicing. Warm parboiled sweet potato crumbles under the knife; cold slices hold together in the pan.
- Sugar and scorchThe sprinkled sugar is there to caramelise, and it burns quickly. Use a moderate heat rather than the "hot fat" of the original, turn the slices once, and expect 3-4 minutes a side. Lard, bacon fat or a neutral oil all work; butter alone will blacken before the sugar sets.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books commonly measure butter by comparison rather than by weight, at a time when it was more often cut from a crock than sold in a stamped stick.
- A pound can of tomatoesA pound can was one of the sizes then sold; today's 14.5-ounce can is the nearest equivalent, and one quart of fresh tomatoes is roughly 2 pounds. Fresh tomatoes will need 20-30 minutes of stewing to go "perfectly smooth"; canned ones perhaps 10.
- The flour needs some cookingTaken literally, stirring in raw flour off the heat leaves a pasty taste. Cook the tomato and butter down first, then let the cream-and-flour mixture bubble gently at just below a simmer for two or three minutes, stirring. The instruction not to boil is most likely aimed at the cream rather than the starch.
- CurdlingTomato acid can split cream that is added cold to a hot pan. Temper it: stir a ladle of the hot tomato into the cream, then return the lot to the pan off the direct heat.
- The toast mattersThis is a sauce thin enough to soak in, so use bread with structure and toast it dark. Thin sandwich bread collapses into paste under it.
- YieldThe tomato dish serves four as a light supper over two slices of toast each, or six as a side. Allow one medium sweet potato per person.
Sugared and fried sweet potato slices belong to a long American habit of treating the sweet potato as something between a vegetable and a dessert, the same impulse that produced candied yams and sweet potato pie; the plant is native to tropical America and had been a Southern staple for generations before this book appeared. The tomato dish shows the other side of the era's vegetable cookery: "a la cr u00eame" was a catch-all name applied to almost anything bound with cream sauce and served on toast, and toast was the standard vehicle for soft, saucy food in an era before it was assumed that every course arrived with a starch of its own. That the recipe offers "one quart of fresh ones or a pound can" as equal options is itself worth noticing: canned tomatoes were evidently familiar enough to stand in for fresh without apology.