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To Boil Sweet Potatoes
Boil large, smooth potatoes till quite done. Peel and slice lengthwise. Pour melted butter over them. Some persons like a dressing of pepper, salt, butter, and cream. Others prefer butter, sifted sugar, and grated nutmeg.
A plain method with two finishing options, one savory and one sweet. Everything depends on not overcooking the potatoes into water-logged mush.
- Choosing the potatoes"Large, smooth" means unblemished tubers of even size so they finish together. Modern orange-fleshed varieties (Beauregard, Jewel) tend to be moister than many of the paler, drier-fleshed sweet potatoes grown in the nineteenth-century South; expect a softer result.
- Skins onThe instruction to peel after boiling is the whole point. Cooking whole and unpeeled keeps water out and sugars in, and the skins slip off easily once drained and cooled a minute or two.
- TimingWhole medium potatoes take roughly 25-40 minutes in salted water at a bare simmer, depending on thickness. "Quite done" is when a skewer meets no resistance at the center; drain immediately.
- Sifted sugarSugar passed through a sieve to break up lumps; in this period that generally meant loaf or lump sugar pounded fine. Modern superfine or powdered sugar is the nearest equivalent, though confectioners' sugar contains added starch.
- Grated nutmegWhole nutmeg grated to order, which is markedly more aromatic than pre-ground. A quarter teaspoon is enough for four potatoes.
- The cream dressingWarm the cream with the butter rather than pouring it cold, or it will pull the heat out of the slices. Season the butter mixture, not the potatoes, so it distributes evenly.
- YieldFigure one medium potato per person as a side dish; four potatoes take about 3 tablespoons of butter.
Sweet potatoes were a staple rather than a holiday luxury in Virginia kitchens, stored through the winter in dry sand or straw-lined pits and brought out as an everyday starch alongside cornbread. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, treats them accordingly: the book gives a cluster of short sweet potato methods, boiled, baked, fried and made into pudding, with no fuss about any of them. What is worth noticing here is the fork in the road at the end. The same vegetable takes either pepper-and-cream or sugar-and-nutmeg, and the recipe declines to rule between them, which is a fair record of a period when sweet potatoes had not yet been pushed decisively toward the dessert end of the American table. The marshmallow-topped casserole belongs to the twentieth century, its earliest widely circulated version coming from commercial recipe promotion by a marshmallow manufacturer; this is the older, plainer treatment.