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Sweet Potatoes
Wash clean and bake in a hot oven one hour; or place in steamer over a kettle of boiling water from half to three-quarters of an hour; or when almost done, take off, scrape or peel them, place in a dripping-pan, and bake half an hour; or cut in slices and fry in butter or lard; or peel and slice when raw, and fry, a layer at a time, on griddle, or in a frying-pan, with a little melted lard, being careful not to cook too long, or they will become too hard; or drop in boiling lard in frying-pan, turning till a nice brown on both sides; or halve or quarter, and bake in pan with roast beef, basting them often with the drippings.
A list of methods rather than a single recipe, written when sweet potatoes were a staple of autumn and winter cellars. A few of the instructions assume a coal range and a much drier potato than most supermarkets now sell.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. An hour is right for a medium potato of 8-10 oz; large ones want 60-75 minutes, and they are done when a skewer meets no resistance at the thickest point, not when the skin looks dark.
- Line the panBaked whole, sweet potatoes weep sugar syrup that carbonises onto a bare sheet. Foil or parchment saves the scrubbing the original cook simply accepted.
- Steaming timesHalf to three-quarters of an hour applies to whole potatoes over hard-boiling water. Cut into 1-inch pieces they steam in 15-20 minutes, which is the more useful route if you are mashing them.
- The par-cook-then-bake methodThis is the best of the lot: steam or boil until barely tender, slip off the skins, then finish in a greased pan at 400F. The half hour is about right and gives the browned, slightly candied edges that plain baking does not.
- Frying raw slicesThe warning not to cook too long is the hinge. Raw sweet potato slices go from tender to leathery quickly because the sugars scorch before the starch softens; keep slices under 1/4 inch, use moderate heat, and turn often.
- Lard and butterButter alone will brown too fast at frying heat. Lard, or a neutral oil, handles the temperature; butter is better added at the end for flavour.
- Roasting with the beefHalved or quartered potatoes need about 45 minutes to an hour in the drippings. Add them to the pan for the last part of the roast rather than at the start, or they will collapse before the meat is done.
- YieldReckon one medium potato per person as a side dish, two if they are small.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, compiled from Ohio housekeepers' contributions) treats the sweet potato as an ordinary winter vegetable, listing seven ways to cook it in a single unbroken paragraph — the compressed style of a book meant for daily reference rather than leisurely reading. The sweet potato is an American tropical crop, cultivated in the Americas long before European contact and carried north into the temperate United States, where it was grown widely enough by the nineteenth century to be cellared alongside white potatoes and pumpkins. Note that every method here is dry-heat or fat-based: baking, steaming, frying, roasting in drippings. Boiling in water is conspicuously absent, and the marshmallow-topped casserole belongs to a later era. The instruction to baste with beef drippings is a reminder that in a household with one oven and one fire, the roast and the vegetables could share a pan.