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Sweet Potatoes Glacé
Peel the boiled or steamed sweet potatoes, and cut them in thick, lengthwise slices. Lay them in a pan, which has been rubbed lightly with Snowdrift, dot with Snowdrift, dust with a little salt, sprinkle thickly with brown sugar, and strew over a little cinnamon. Bake until a rich brown.
A candied sweet potato recipe from a shortening manufacturer's promotional cookbook, written with the assumption that the cook already knows what a browned sugar crust looks like. Two things are unstated: the oven temperature and the quantity of anything.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold in America from around the turn of the twentieth century (later hydrogenated), broadly comparable in use to Crisco. Any solid vegetable shortening works; butter is arguably preferable here, since the dish gains from the browning butter gives and nothing in the method appears to depend on shortening's higher smoke point.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. 400F is a reasonable choice: the sugar wants to caramelize rather than simply melt and pool, and at a lower temperature the potatoes may dry out before the top colours.
- TimingRoughly 25 to 35 minutes for potatoes already cooked through. Baste once or twice with the syrup that collects in the pan, or the exposed edges scorch while the undersides stay pale.
- QuantitiesWork from about 3 lb sweet potatoes, 3 tablespoons fat, 3/4 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon. That fills a 9x13 pan and serves six to eight as a side dish.
- Boiled or steamed firstSteam or boil the potatoes whole in their skins and cool them before peeling and slicing. Stopping short of completely soft makes them easier to cut into slices that hold their shape through the bake, though the recipe itself does not specify this.
- Slice thickness"Thick, lengthwise slices" suggests something around half an inch. Much thinner and they tend to break up in the syrup; much thicker and the sugar may colour well before the slices are heated through.
- The panUse a shallow dish and lay the slices in a single layer. Stacked slices steam rather than glaze, and the point of the recipe is the crust.
This comes from a cookbook published to sell Snowdrift, a cottonseed-oil shortening that competed with lard and butter in American kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century; the recipes exist to demonstrate that the product can do everything animal fat does. Candied sweet potatoes themselves are much older than the shortening, and are strongly associated with the American South, where sweet potatoes were a staple field crop and cheap brown sugar or molasses the obvious sweetener. Its migration to the holiday table, and eventually the marshmallow-topped version, came later; here it is still simply a baked side dish with sugar and cinnamon on it.