Peel and boil 3 sweet potatoes in salted water until tender; then mash well with 3 beaten yolks of eggs, 1 cup of milk, 3 tablespoonfuls of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar, a pinch of nutmeg and lemon-juice. Beat the whites with a pinch of salt to a stiff froth; add to the potatoes and put in a well-buttered baking-dish and bake. Serve hot.
A soufflé-style sweet potato casserole with no oven temperature, no timing and no pan size — all of which the period cook was expected to supply. Everything else is straightforward.
- Oven and timingBake at 350F. A 1 1/2-quart dish takes about 30 to 40 minutes, until puffed and set in the centre with a lightly browned top. It falls somewhat as it cools, like any egg-white-lifted pudding.
- Fold, do not beatThe instruction to "add" the whites means fold them in, in two or three additions, once the potato mixture has cooled to warm. Stirred into hot potato they collapse and you get a dense pudding rather than a puff.
- Potato quantity"3 sweet potatoes" is the loosest measure here. Aim for about 1 1/2 lb raw, giving roughly 3 cups mashed; much more and the cup of milk plus butter will make it soupy.
- Lemon-juiceNo amount is given. One to two teaspoons is enough to sharpen the sugar and nutmeg without curdling the milk.
- Dry the potatoesBoiled sweet potatoes hold a great deal of water. Drain well and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing, or the puff will weep.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. The sugar notwithstanding, it reads as a vegetable dish rather than a dessert, though the recipe says only "Serve hot."
The "of all nations" framing in these daily calendar cookbooks was loose, and this entry shows it: sweet potatoes are a New World crop, and the dish is closer to American holiday cooking than to anything from the Netherlands. What earns it the label "Dutch" may be the Pennsylvania Dutch ame, is often explained as an anglicisation of Deutsch, though "Dutch" was also long used in English for German-speaking people generally; the connection here is a guess, as the recipe itself gives no clue. The technique is the familiar soufflé method applied to a vegetable: yolks and butter for richness, whipped whites for lift, baked in a buttered dish and served before it sinks.