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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
Wash and pare six medium-sized sweet potatoes. Parboil ten minutes in boiling salted water; drain and cut lengthwise in halves. Arrange them in a well-buttered granite dripping pan. Make a syrup by boiling one cup sugar with one-half cup water and two tablespoons butter three or four minutes. Dip each piece of potato into syrup and arrange in dripping pan. Bake until potatoes are tender (about forty minutes) basting two or three times with remaining syrup. Oven should not be too hot as these potatoes will scorch easily.
A straightforward candied sweet potato, distinguished from the modern casserole by the fact that the syrup is made separately on the stove and the potatoes are basted rather than buried. The single instruction that matters is the last one: sugar syrup in a shallow pan will darken and turn bitter well before forty minutes at high heat.
- Oven temperature"Oven should not be too hot" points to a moderate oven; the book gives no number, but somewhere around 325-350F is a fair modern reading. Much hotter and the syrup in the bottom of the pan caramelizes past the point of pleasantness and sticks hard to the metal.
- Granite dripping panGranite ware is enameled sheet steel, not stone. Any shallow roasting pan or metal baking dish works; glass or ceramic is fine and slightly more forgiving of scorching.
- Which sweet potatoesThe American market has long run to both dry, pale-fleshed varieties and moist orange ones. Either works, but the moist orange sorts now sold as "yams" (Beauregard, Garnet, Jewel) release more water and may need the full forty minutes; dry-fleshed types tend to cook faster and drink up more syrup.
- The parboilTen minutes in boiling salted water is a head start, not a full cooking. The potatoes should still meet resistance at the center when you halve them, or they will collapse when dipped and basted.
- Cut to match the panSix medium potatoes halved lengthwise give twelve pieces. Arrange them cut side down in a single layer with a little space between; crowded, they steam instead of glazing.
- The syrupOne cup sugar, half a cup water and two tablespoons butter boiled three or four minutes makes a thin syrup, not a caramel. Keep it in the pot on low heat while you dip so it stays pourable for basting.
- BastingTwo or three times over forty minutes is the minimum. Tilt the pan and spoon the collected syrup back over the tops; if it has reduced to a stiff glaze before the potatoes are tender, add a tablespoon or two of water to the pan.
- YieldServes six as a side dish. It is very sweet by current taste, and the sugar can be reduced to about two-thirds cup, though the glaze will be correspondingly thinner.
Candied and glazed sweet potatoes belong to the American holiday table well before marshmallows arrived on top of them, and the technique here, dipping parboiled roots in sugar syrup and roasting them, is essentially how confectioners candied fruit and how cooks treated carrots and parsnips as well. The dish is well suited to midwinter: sweet potatoes cure and sweeten in storage over the autumn, so a December potato is markedly sweeter than one dug in September, and by midwinter it was one of the few vegetables in a northern cellar still worth serving as a treat.