Laurette Taylor
SOUTHERN SWEET POTATOES
Peel and slice sweet potatoes lengthwise and place them in a covered pan in layers with butter, sugar, a very little cinnamon and one or two tablespoons of water. Bake very slowly over a low flame thirty minutes or more.
A candied sweet potato done in a covered pan rather than an open dish, so the slices steam in their own butter and syrup instead of browning. The text as printed carries a stray line from the preceding entry — "Cook the duck in a brisk oven till tender. Boil the" — which belongs to another recipe and should be ignored.
- Covered, not openThe lid is the whole method. Two tablespoons of water plus the moisture in the potatoes generates steam, the butter and sugar reduce to a glaze, and nothing dries out. Uncover it and you have a different, drier dish entirely.
- "Over a low flame"The instruction mixes stovetop and oven language. Either works: a heavy covered pan over the lowest burner setting, or a covered dish in a low oven — the recipe names no temperature, but "very slowly" points to the bottom of the range, somewhere around 275-300F. On the burner, use a diffuser or the bottom layer will scorch in the sugar.
- Thirty minutes or moreThirty minutes suits slices no thicker than a quarter inch. Lengthwise planks cut from a large potato will want 45 to 60 minutes. Test with a knife tip at the center of the thickest slice.
- Quantities are left to the cookNo amounts are given for butter, sugar or cinnamon. A working ratio is about 2 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons brown or granulated sugar per pound of peeled potato, with cinnamon at a scant quarter teaspoon — the recipe asks only for "a very little."
- The potato itself"Southern sweet potato" most likely points to the moist orange-fleshed type sold in American markets as a yam, though the recipe says no more than that. The drier pale-fleshed varieties absorb the syrup less readily and may want a little more water.
- Slicing lengthwiseLong planks hold together through a slow bake in a way that rounds do not, and they layer flat so the butter and sugar reach every surface. Keep the thickness even or the pan cooks unevenly.
- YieldTwo pounds of sweet potatoes prepared this way serves four to six as a side, most naturally alongside roast poultry or ham.
Candied sweet potatoes belong to a Southern and mid-Atlantic tradition older than the cookbooks that record it, and by Laurette Taylor's day the dish was widely, if unevenly, established as a holiday and Sunday-dinner side. What distinguishes this version is its restraint: no marshmallow, no molasses, no orange, just butter, sugar and a whisper of cinnamon, cooked slowly under a lid until the slices are soft and lacquered. Celebrity cookbooks of the early twentieth century — recipes gathered from stage and screen performers, often for charity — traded on exactly this contrast, the famous name attached to something plain enough for anyone's kitchen. Taylor, an Irish-American actress who spent years playing sentimental comedy before her late triumph in The Glass Menagerie, contributed something that at least reads, on this one page, as domestic rather than composed for print.