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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Peel boiled sweet potatoes and cut in slices crosswise. To 2 cups of slices allow 3 tablespoons Crisco, and 2 tablespoons each of sugar and vinegar. Have Crisco hot, lay potatoes in it, sprinkle sugar over top, and pour vinegar over lightly. Bake until a golden brown.
A candied sweet potato dish from a shortening-company cookbook, written in the compressed style of its period: no pan size, no temperature, no time. The proportions are sound; everything else needs filling in.
- Crisco means shorteningCrisco was new when this book was written and appears throughout it, the book having been published to promote it. Butter can be substituted here and some cooks prefer the way it browns; any neutral solid fat, or 3 tablespoons of oil, will also do the job.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Use 400F — hot enough to reduce the vinegar and caramelize the sugar, not so hot that the syrup scorches before the slices color.
- TimingExpect 25 to 35 minutes, turning the slices once at the halfway point so both cut faces glaze. The potatoes are already cooked through; you are only browning and glazing.
- The hinge is a shallow panHeat the fat in the baking dish itself and lay the slices in a single layer. Stacked or crowded, they steam in their own moisture and never reach the golden brown the recipe asks for.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe says only "slices crosswise"; about half an inch holds up best. Thinner rounds are more likely to break up in the pan.
- VinegarPlain cider vinegar suits this best. The two tablespoons sound aggressive but cook down against the equal quantity of sugar into a sweet-sour glaze rather than a cloying one.
- YieldTwo cups of slices is roughly one large or two smallish sweet potatoes and serves two or three as a side dish. Scale up in the same ratios, keeping to one layer per pan.
This appears to come from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe books issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco after the hydrogenated vegetable shortening went on sale in 1911; the compiler generally credited is Marion Harris Neil. Such books were arranged as day-by-day menus, and the reader was meant to cook the whole dinner as printed, with the branded fat recurring throughout. The dish itself is a version of the sweet-sour candied sweet potato said to have been common in American home cooking, where sugar is cut with vinegar or lemon rather than left cloying, and it is often placed in the older tradition of finishing an already-boiled vegetable in a hot fat in the oven instead of frying it on the range.