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Candied Sweet Potatoes
12 sweet potatoes, 1 cup boiling water, brown sugar, 1/4 cup Crisco, salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon. Pare and parboil potatoes, cut in halves, boil 10 minutes, drain, lay in greased baking dish. Spread with Crisco, sprinkle with brown sugar, salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon, pour in boiling water and cook until tender. Baste often with sauce in pan while cooking. The cinnamon may be omitted.
A straightforward baked sweet potato dish from a Crisco promotional book, written for cooks who were assumed to know what "cook until tender" meant. The gaps are oven temperature, sugar quantity, and the sequence of two separate boils.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake uncovered at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the syrup in the pan has thickened and the edges of the potatoes are browned. Higher than that and the sugar scorches before the potatoes finish.
- The double boil is a typo trapThe two boils -- "Pare and parboil potatoes, cut in halves, boil 10 minutes" can be read either as one cooking or as a parboil followed by a further 10 minutes. Either way the potatoes should come out of the water only part-cooked: a knife should enter the outside but meet resistance at the center. Fully soft potatoes collapse into the syrup in the oven.
- Brown sugar, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity. About 1 cup packed brown sugar suits 12 potatoes; use less if your potatoes are a sweet modern variety such as Beauregard or Garnet.
- CriscoStill sold and still works here, but 1/4 cup butter gives a better flavor with brown sugar. Crisco was reformulated in 2007 to reduce trans fat; the current product behaves the same in a baking dish.
- Basting is the hingeThe cup of boiling water and the sugar only become a glaze if you spoon the pan liquid back over the potatoes every 10 minutes or so. Skip it and you get pale potatoes sitting in sweet water.
- Pepper and cinnamonThe recipe seasons with salt and pepper as well as sugar, and the pepper is worth keeping; it cuts the sweetness. The cinnamon is explicitly optional in the original.
- YieldTwelve potatoes halved feeds 10 to 12 as a side dish. For four people, use 4 potatoes, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 1 tablespoon fat, and 1/3 cup boiling water in a smaller dish.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a series of cookbooks issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it introduced in 1911; the recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, and they call for Crisco again and again, often in places where butter or lard would have been the obvious choice. That is why a dish of baked sweet potatoes calls for a quarter cup of shortening spread over the halves. Candied sweet potatoes themselves are older than the book and are generally traced to the American South, where sweet potatoes were a staple field crop and molasses or brown sugar the cheap sweetener at hand; the marshmallow-topped version most Americans now associate with Thanksgiving belongs to the same commercial-cookbook era, having been popularized by a promotional booklet for a marshmallow manufacturer around 1917.