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Southern Sweet Potatoes
Boil six medium-sized sweet potatoes until nearly done. Peel and slice the long way into pieces about half an inch thick. Fill a baking dish with layers of the slices thickly covered with dark brown sugar and bits of butter. Pour over a half cup of boiling water. Cook in a hot oven for twenty or thirty minutes. This will fill a quart and a half baking dish.-Mrs Henry S. Judson.
A candied sweet potato of the plainest sort: three ingredients plus water, and the only real technique is knowing when to stop boiling.
- Par-boil, don't cook through"Nearly done" means a knife meets slight resistance at the center; for whole medium potatoes boiled in the skin, expect somewhere in the range of 20 to 30 minutes, and test rather than trust the clock. Fully soft slices collapse into mush once the sugar syrup goes to work in the oven.
- Hot oven"Hot" in this period covers roughly 400-450F; 425F is a reasonable middle. At that heat the water, sugar and butter should reduce to a glaze within the stated 20 to 30 minutes, whereas a moderate oven is more likely to leave thin syrup.
- Quantities of sugar and butterThe recipe leaves both to judgment. For six potatoes, about 3/4 to 1 cup dark brown sugar and 4 tablespoons butter, distributed over three or four layers, gives the thick coating implied by "thickly covered."
- Boiling water, not coldThe half cup is specified boiling; the likely reason is that the sugar begins dissolving at once rather than sitting granular under the top layer, and the dish is not cooled at the start.
- Dish sizeA quart and a half is about a 1.5-quart / 6-cup baking dish; a standard 8-inch square pan is larger, closer to two quarts. Choose something shallow enough that the syrup reduces rather than pooling.
- Baste once or twiceThe recipe says nothing about covering or basting, but spooning the syrup back over the top layer partway through helps produce a lacquered surface, and leaving it uncovered lets the liquid reduce.
- YieldSix servings as a side dish, fewer at a holiday table where it tends to be eaten as something close to a dessert.
Candied sweet potatoes belong to a distinctly American line of cooking in which a vegetable is treated with sugar and butter until it sits somewhere between side dish and confection, and by the late nineteenth century recipes of this shape were common enough that cookbooks printed them with little explanation. The "Southern" label probably reflects where the sweet potato was most cheaply and abundantly grown rather than any single regional original; northern housekeepers adopted the dish readily. The attribution to Mrs Henry S. Judson tells us little on its own, and the recipe reads as a piece of household practice rather than the work of a single author.