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To Cook Inferior Sweet Potatoes
Boil till nearly done. Cut in thick slices; put a layer in the bottom of a baking dish. Put pepper, salt, sugar, bits of butter, and a teaspoonful vinegar on this layer, and so on till the dish is filled, leaving a layer of seasoning for the top. Pour over it a teacup rich milk. Put a tin plate on top and bake a few minutes. Put grated cracker, on top.--Mrs. S. T.
A scalloped sweet potato dish built to rescue watery, stringy or bland roots, of the sort that came out of the bottom of the barrel in late winter. The seasoning is the point: sugar and vinegar together are doing the work flavor lacks.
- "Inferior" potatoesProbably undersized, dry-fleshed, or late-season sweet potatoes that will not bake well on their own; the recipe does not say. Any ordinary supermarket sweet potato will work; the dish simply becomes richer than intended.
- Parboil, do not cook through"Boil till nearly done" means a knife meets slight resistance at the center; for whole medium potatoes that may take 20-30 minutes, less for cut pieces. Fully soft potatoes collapse into mush once sliced and layered.
- A teacup of milkA period teacup is usually reckoned at about 6 fluid ounces, though period usage varied; either way it is less than a modern measuring cup. "Rich milk" means whole milk or milk with cream added; half-and-half is the closest single substitute.
- The vinegarA teaspoon per layer sounds aggressive but reads as brightness against the sugar rather than sourness. Cider vinegar suits the dish better than distilled white.
- Grated crackerNineteenth-century crackers were hard, unsalted or lightly salted biscuits grated on a box grater. Coarse unseasoned cracker crumbs or dry breadcrumbs give the same effect; dot them with a little more butter so they brown.
- The tin plateAn inverted plate served as a lid, trapping steam so the milk sets into the layers without drying. Foil does the same job; remove it for the last few minutes so the crumb topping colors.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given, and the recipe says only "bake a few minutes," assuming potatoes already nearly cooked and a hot range. In a modern oven a moderate heat of around 350F is a reasonable guess, and you will likely need longer -- perhaps 20-30 minutes covered, then 10 uncovered.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. About three pounds of sweet potatoes will fill a 2-quart dish and serve six as a side.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives and generally dated to 1878, is full of recipes signed only with initials, and this one carries the frank practicality that runs through the book: it exists because sweet potatoes stored through the winter go dry, fibrous and flat-tasting, and a household that had put up a crop could not simply discard the poor ones. Sweet potatoes were a staple of the Virginia and wider Southern table long before the Civil War, valued because they kept without processing and grew reliably in sandy tidewater soil. The treatment here, layering with butter, sugar and a sharp note of vinegar under a teacup of rich milk, is the same logic as scalloped apples or scalloped tomatoes elsewhere in the period's cookbooks: cheap ingredients, a browned crumb top, and seasoning used to supply what the main ingredient no longer has.