Home › Vegetables › Sweet Potatoes and Apples
Sweet Potatoes and Apples
Boil sweet potatoes until tender, then slice them in small pieces. Make an apple sauce just as it should be served for the table. Put a layer of sweet potatoes in the bottom of a baking-dish; sprinkle with a very little sugar and dot over the top a few flecks of butter. On top of this put a layer of the apple sauce, alternately using the sweet potatoes and apples until the dish is filled. Finish the top with the potatoes and then use more butter and sugar, so that a rich brown crust is formed. Bake from one hour to one and a half hours. This is very good with game.
A layered scalloped dish that assumes you already have applesauce on hand and an oven with no dial. Everything here is pre-cooked, so the baking is only about browning and marrying the layers.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for the full hour; at 400F the top crust forms in 30 to 40 minutes but the interior can dry out.
- Baking timeOne to one and a half hours is longer than the dish needs now, since both components go in fully cooked. Bake until the top is browned and the edges bubble, then stop; extended time only drives off moisture.
- The applesauce"Just as it should be served for the table" means a sauce already sweetened and seasoned to taste, thick rather than runny. A watery sauce will pool at the bottom of the dish; drain or reduce it first.
- Butter and sugar quantitiesUnspecified throughout. For a 2-quart dish figure about 3 tablespoons butter and 2 to 3 tablespoons brown or granulated sugar total, most of it on the final potato layer where the crust forms.
- Boiling the potatoesBoil them in their skins and peel while warm; the skins slip off and the flesh absorbs less water. Slices about a quarter-inch thick layer more evenly than chunks.
- The top layerThe recipe specifies finishing with potatoes and then more butter and sugar "so that a rich brown crust is formed." Applesauce left exposed on top is more likely to dry and darken than to glaze; butter and sugar on the starchy potato brown better.
- Yield and servingRoughly 2 lb sweet potatoes and 2 cups applesauce should fill a 2-quart dish and serve about six as a side. The recipe's own note that it is "very good with game" suits duck, venison and goose; it would work equally with pork or roast poultry.
Sweet potatoes and apples baked together appears in nineteenth-century American cookery, sometimes under names like scalloped sweet potatoes and apples. The pairing is practical as much as culinary: both keep well in a cellar into late winter, and the acidity of apples offsets the flatness of a starchy root that has been sitting in storage. The note that it suits game reflects a period when wild duck, venison and rabbit turned up on the table more often than now. Recipes of this sort were often recorded in shorthand, assuming the cook already knew what good applesauce tasted like and how hot her own oven ran.