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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Select smooth sweet potatoes of uniform size. Wash and scrub with a vegetable brush. Bake same as white potatoes. When soft, break the skins, put into each a teaspoon butter and serve hot.
The recipe leans on a cross-reference the modern reader does not have: "bake same as white potatoes." Here are the numbers.
- Oven and time400F for 45 to 60 minutes, depending on thickness. Sweet potatoes are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the centre and the skin has begun to blister.
- Why uniform size mattersThe instruction to select potatoes of one size is the hinge of the recipe. Mixed sizes means the small ones collapse to strings while the large ones are still raw at the core.
- Do not wrap in foilA bare potato on the rack or on a sheet dries and concentrates; wrapped, it steams and the flesh stays watery. The original assumed a dry oven, which is the better result.
- Line the panSweet potatoes leak sugary syrup as they bake and it burns hard onto a bare sheet. Parchment or foil under them, not around them.
- Break the skins at onceSplitting them the moment they come out lets steam escape so the flesh stays fluffy rather than soggy. Left whole to sit, they go dense.
- Butter quantityA teaspoon per potato is modest by current habit; many modern recipes call for closer to a tablespoon. Salt is not mentioned and is worth adding.
- YieldOne potato, roughly 6 to 8 oz, per person as a side dish.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treated the sweet potato as a distinct vegetable from the "white" or "Irish" potato, and the phrasing here reflects that: the white potato is the default, the sweet one the variant. Sweet potatoes are native to the Americas and were long a staple of Southern cooking, travelling north on the winter market as a cheap, keeping vegetable. A recipe of four sentences was not thought slight, because the reader was assumed to have already learned to bake a potato and needed only to be told that this one wanted the same treatment. The orange-fleshed varieties now sold in most American supermarkets, often labelled "yams," were bred and marketed later; the sweet potatoes available to a cook of this period were more often the paler, drier-fleshed sorts, which may make the teaspoon of butter read as a more necessary addition than it does today.