Home › Meats and Poultry › Sweet Potato Stew
Sweet Potato Stew
Cut a pound of round steak into small pieces, put into a granite ware saucepan, cover with hot water and place on the stove. When about to boil, remove the cover and carefully skim off the dark scum which will rise to the top. Put a small piece of butter and salt and pepper to taste, two or three onions cut small and the same number of tomatoes. Then pare and cut up three or four sweet potatoes and with these completely cover the other ingredients. Allow it to boil quickly for a few minutes, then simmer for two or three hours. This stew will bear reheating, as the sweet potatoes never become sodden like their Irish cousins. Emelia Cowell.
A plain long-simmered beef stew whose only trick is that the sweet potatoes sit on top rather than in the liquid. Keep that arrangement and the dish works as written.
- Granite wareSpeckled enamelled steel, sold as "granite ware" or "agate ware" from the 1870s on and prized because it did not react with acidic foods. Any heavy non-reactive pot — enamelled cast iron or stainless — does the same job.
- The hinge: potatoes on topThe recipe has the sweet potatoes laid over the meat so that they cover it completely rather than being stirred through the liquid. Cutting them large and leaving them undisturbed keeps them from breaking down into the broth.
- SkimmingThe "dark scum" is coagulated protein rising as the water heats. Skim it before the liquid reaches a full boil, when it is still a raft on the surface; once boiling breaks it up it disperses and clouds the broth.
- Round steakA lean, sinewy cut from the hind leg. Two to three hours of gentle simmering is what it needs. Chuck will give a richer result in the same time if round is not to hand.
- Water quantityThe recipe says only to cover the meat with hot water and gives no measure; enough to cover a pound of cut-up meat is the whole instruction. Err on the low side, since the sweet potatoes are laid over the top rather than submerged.
- TomatoesTwo or three fresh tomatoes, cut up; the recipe gives no further preparation. Out of season, about a cup of canned chopped tomatoes with their juice will stand in, with the added water reduced accordingly.
- Simmer, not boilAfter the initial hard boil, hold the pot at a bare tremble — around 180–190°F. A rolling boil for two hours will both toughen the beef and collapse the potatoes.
- YieldA pound of meat with three or four sweet potatoes will serve about four as a main course, though the recipe gives no yield. The author's own claim is narrower than 'better the next day': she says only that it will bear reheating.
The comparison at the end — sweet potatoes that "never become sodden like their Irish cousins" — is the point of the recipe as much as the beef is. Sweet potatoes hold their shape through long cooking and reheating, a difference from the white potato often attributed to their starch, though sugar and cell-wall behaviour likely play a part too, and a cook feeding a family from one pot across two days had good reason to notice. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, were a staple of American domestic magazines and the cook book collections drawn from them: readers sent in tested dishes, which were printed under their names and later gathered into subject chapters. That is why a homely one-pot supper can sit beside more formal roasts — it arrived from a household kitchen rather than a professional one.