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Mashed Sweet Potatoes
Wash, pare thinly sweet potatoes, cover with boiling salted water and cook until soft. Press them through potato ricer. There should be two cups. Add four tablespoons butter, salt if necessary, and two tablespoons hot cream or milk. Beat with a slotted spoon until very light. Press again through potato ricer into hot dish.
A straightforward turn-of-the-century side dish, with one unusual step: the potatoes go through the ricer twice, the second time directly into the serving dish.
- QuantityTwo cups of riced sweet potato is roughly 1 1/2 lb of potatoes before peeling. That serves four as a side, generously three.
- Pare thinlySweet potato flesh sits immediately under the skin, and a thick peel wastes a good deal of it. A swivel peeler does this easily.
- Boiling salted waterThe recipe starts the potatoes in water already boiling. If you cut them into even chunks, expect roughly 15 to 20 minutes; whole potatoes take longer.
- Four tablespoons butterThat is half a stick to two cups of potato, which is rich by modern proportion but produces the texture the recipe is after. Cut it back if you like, but the mash will be correspondingly stiffer.
- Hot cream or milkHeat the dairy before it goes in. Cold liquid into hot starch dulls the mash and cools it below serving temperature.
- The second ricingThis is the point of the recipe. Riced a second time straight into a warmed dish, the potato falls in light strands rather than being spread flat, and it holds that airiness on the table. Do not smooth it down afterwards.
- BeatingA slotted spoon lightens the mash without working it hard. Avoid a food processor or stick blender, which can make the texture gummy.
- ServingWarm the dish thoroughly. Riced potato has enormous surface area and loses heat fast, which is exactly why the original specifies a hot dish.
Sweet potatoes were an autumn and winter staple in American kitchens long before they became fixed to Thanksgiving. What dates the recipe is the ricer: the potato ricer was standard equipment in well-equipped kitchens of the period, valued because it broke potato down without the beating and mashing that make starch turn sticky. Note also the absence of sugar, marshmallow or spice, all of which attach themselves to many American sweet potato dishes; here the potato is treated exactly as a white potato would be, with butter, salt and cream.