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Browned Sweet Potatoes
Boil sweet potatoes, remove skins and cut lengthwise in one-half inch slices. Cool. Dip each slice in melted butter, sprinkle with salt, pepper and thickly with brown sugar. Lay in a well-greased dripping pan and brown in a hot oven. Dispose around rim of platter containing Fried Chicken.
A straightforward candied sweet potato, made ahead of the roast and finished quickly in a hot oven. The only real technique is in the cooling.
- Hot ovenIn cookbooks of this period a "hot oven" is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the brown sugar caramelizes before the slices dry out; expect roughly 15-20 minutes, turning once, but go by colour.
- Cool them properlyThe instruction to cool is the hinge. Warm boiled sweet potato slumps and tears when handled. Note that the recipe peels and slices first and cools afterwards; if you prefer, boil in the skins and let them come to room temperature before peeling and slicing.
- Dripping panThis is the shallow rectangular pan that sat under a roast, i.e. a rimmed sheet pan or a roasting pan. Grease it well and give the slices space; crowded, they steam rather than brown.
- Sweet potato, not yamSweet potato -- the recipe does not say which kind. Both moist orange-fleshed and drier pale-fleshed ("Jersey") sweet potatoes were sold in this period; either can be used, though the drier sort takes the sugar less readily.
- Sugar quantity"thickly" is the author's only measure. A light dusting will simply dissolve and disappear, so coat each slice generously.
- QuantityNo yield is given. Three medium sweet potatoes give roughly a dozen slices, enough to ring a platter for four to six.
- Timing with the chickenSince the potatoes are cooked, cooled and then browned, the whole first stage can be done the day before. Slide the pan into the oven while the fried chicken drains.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American cookbooks organized as complete menus rather than lists of dishes, aimed at the housekeeper planning a week ahead — hence the instruction to arrange the potatoes around the rim of the fried chicken platter, a piece of table staging as much as a recipe. Browned or candied sweet potatoes were a common feature of the autumn table in the United States, where the crop comes in through September and October. The pairing with fried chicken is often associated with Southern cooking, though its origin is not documented.