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Browned Sweet Potatoes
Boil the potatoes until they can be pierced with a fork, but not until tender.
Remove the skins, dust lightly with sugar, roll in melted butter and brown in the oven.
A short recipe that assumes you know what "brown in the oven" means. The whole thing hinges on stopping the boil early, while the potatoes still hold their shape.
- The parboilBoil whole, unpeeled sweet potatoes 15-20 minutes depending on size, until a fork goes in with resistance. Fully tender potatoes collapse when you roll them in butter and again when you turn them in the pan.
- Oven temperatureThe original leaves it open; a hot oven, somewhere around 400-425F, gives the sugar and butter enough heat to caramelize before the interiors overcook. Roughly 20-25 minutes, turning once.
- Peeling while hotSkins slip off easily if you drain the potatoes and peel them as soon as you can handle them. Cooled potatoes hold onto their skins.
- Cut or wholeSmall potatoes can go in whole; larger ones should be halved or cut into thick lengths so there is more surface to brown.
- Sugar"Dust lightly" is just that: a teaspoon or so of granulated or brown sugar per pound is plenty. The moist orange-fleshed varieties sold today as yams were not yet dominant when this book was written, and the drier pale-fleshed types then common are generally reckoned less sweet. Either way, heavy sugaring will scorch before the surface browns.
- ButterMelted butter alone will darken at 425F. Use a shallow buttered pan, baste once with the pan drippings, and pull them when the edges are glossy and blistered.
- YieldFigure one medium potato per person, something like 1½-2 lb for four as a side dish. Best served straight from the pan; the caramelized surface softens as they sit.
Browned or "candied" sweet potatoes belong to a family of American side dishes built on the same logic: parboil, sweeten lightly, and finish in fat over heat until the exterior caramelizes. The technique is older than the marshmallow-topped casserole most people now associate with sweet potatoes, which is generally traced to the late 1910s and the 1920s, when marshmallow makers promoted it. In turn-of-the-century household books, sweet potatoes are treated with restraint -- a dust of sugar to encourage browning, not to make a dessert -- rather than as a holiday specialty. Sweet potatoes were a staple field crop in the American South and, once cured, kept through winter in cool, dry, frost-free storage, which is why they turn up in general-purpose cookbooks with so little ceremony.