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Some Kitchen Kinks: Sweet
Sweet Potatoes. - Southern and northern tastes differ as to what is a desirable quality in a sweet potato.
In the South the moist potato is considered best. At the North the dry potato is more generally liked.
The variety of potatoes grown for the northern market is commonly less sweet and moist than those grown for the South. However, long cooking will make any sweet potato moist. Baked Sweet Potatoes.
Wash the potatoes and bake the same as white potatoes. Small ones will bake in half an hour, while very large ones will require an hour or more. If the potatoes are liked very moist and sweet, bake from an hour to two hours, depending on size.
Browned Sweet Potatoes.
Boil medium-sized sweet potatoes forty-five minutes. Peel them and cut in halves lengthwise. Put them in a baking pan and baste with savory drippings, and season with salt.
Cook them in a hot oven for twenty minutes.
Fried Sweet Potatoes.
Cut the boiled potatoes in slices and fry brown in savory drippings.
Or the potatoes may be cut in four parts lengthwise, put in a frying basket and be cooked for ten minutes in smoking hot fat. The fat must be deep enough to cover the potatoes.
Candied Sweet Potatoes.
Candied sweet potatoes are very popular on southern tables, and are extremely palatable when well prepared. Cut boiled sweet potatoes into long slices, place in an earthen dish, put lumps of butter on each slice, and sprinkle with sugar. Some cooks add a little water also. Bake until the sugar and butter have candied and the potatoes are brown. OTHER ROOTS AND BULBS Jerusalem Artichoke. This vegetable is in season in the fall and spring, and may be cooked like kohlrabi and served in a white cream or sauce. The artichoke may also be cooked in milk.
When this is done, cut the washed and peeled artichoke into cubes, put in a stewpan, and cover with milk (a generous pint to a quart of cubes).
Add one small onion and cook twenty minutes. Beat together one tablespoonful of butter and one level tablespoonful of flour, and stir this into the boiling milk. Then season with a teaspoonful of salt and onefourth of a teaspoonful of pepper, and continue the cooking half an hour longer. The cooking should be done in a double boiler. The artichoke also makes a very good soup.
A cluster of short methods rather than one recipe; the assumptions about oven heat, cooking fat and vegetable varieties all need translating.
- Oven temperaturesThe book only says to bake sweet potatoes "the same as white potatoes", so a moderately hot oven of about 400-425F is a reasonable modern reading; "hot oven" for the browning stage is conventionally 425-450F. The long one-to-two-hour bake for a moist, sweet result works because the enzymes that convert starch to sugar are active over a band of roughly 135-170F before the heat destroys them, so a slower oven around 300-325F for 90 minutes holds the potato in that range longer.
- "Savory drippings"Rendered fat saved from roast meat or bacon, kept in a crock by the stove. Bacon fat is the closest everyday substitute; butter, duck fat or olive oil all work, though the original assumes a distinctly meaty background flavour.
- Forty-five minutes of boilingLonger than most whole medium sweet potatoes need. Boil them whole and unpeeled for about 30-35 minutes, until a knife meets slight resistance, since they finish in the oven or the pan; cut pieces will be done in 15-20.
- Earthen dishA glazed ceramic or stoneware baking dish. For the candied version use one just large enough to hold the slices in a single layer, so the butter and sugar reduce to syrup rather than spreading thin and burning.
- Deep-frying"Smoking hot fat" is hotter than you want. Hold the fat at 350-375F and expect 4-6 minutes for quarters, not ten; sweet potatoes have enough sugar to darken well before they are cooked through.
- North and South varietiesThe "moist" southern potato is the orange-fleshed type sold in the US as a yam (Beauregard, Jewel). The "dry" northern one was a pale or white-fleshed sort; pale, drier-fleshed sweet potatoes are still sold today as boniato or Japanese sweet potato, though these are not necessarily the same varieties. Both are true sweet potatoes; neither is a yam.
- Jerusalem artichokesSold now as sunchokes: knobbly tubers of a sunflower, unrelated to globe artichokes. Peel and drop into acidulated water to stop browning. They store carbohydrate as inulin rather than starch, which is why they never go floury and why they are notoriously gas-producing for some people.
- The artichoke-in-milk timingTwenty minutes plus a further half hour will reduce diced sunchokes to pulp. Simmer the cubes in the milk 12-15 minutes until just tender, then thicken with the butter-and-flour paste and cook a few minutes more to lose the raw flour taste. The double boiler is there only to keep the milk from scorching over a coal fire; a heavy pan on low heat does the same.
- Quantities and yieldFor the sunchokes: about a pint of milk to a quart of cubes, roughly 1 1/4 lb of tubers, serving four. The sweet potato methods give no numbers at all; count one medium potato per person, two for a substantial side.
The note on regional taste is the most interesting thing here: American cookbooks of the period repeatedly draw a line between the moist, deep-orange sweet potatoes grown for southern markets and the drier, paler kinds sold in the North, a distinction that survives in the supermarket habit of labelling the orange sort "yams" — a name borrowed from the unrelated African tuber and generally traced to the produce trade rather than to any botanical fact. Candied sweet potatoes, called out here as a southern speciality, belong to a family of cheap-sugar dishes that spread widely once refined sugar became an everyday grocery in the later nineteenth century. The Jerusalem artichoke is the odd one out: a North American sunflower tuber sent to Europe in the early 1600s and grown there long before it came back into fashion at home, its name usually explained as an English mangling of Italian girasole, "turning to the sun", though that etymology is traditional rather than firmly documented.