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Sweet Potatoes
4 sweet potatoes 1 tablespoonful butter 1/2 pint (I cup) molasses Salt and pepper Select yellow sweet potatoes, peel them, and slice them lengthways. Steam with the butter, salt and pepper, and a little water.
When tender drain off the water. Put the potatoes 2 beets 2 onions 2 turnips 3 carrots 5 potatoes I parsnip
The text as printed breaks off mid-sentence and runs straight into the ingredient list of the recipe that follows it, so what survives is a partial method for candied sweet potatoes. The steaming stage is complete; the finish is not.
- The page is corruptedEverything from "2 beets" onward belongs to a different recipe — almost certainly a mixed vegetable dish or soup on the next line of the original page. Ignore it here; there are no beets, turnips, carrots, white potatoes or parsnip in the sweet potato dish.
- What the missing line saidThe sentence stops at "Put the potatoes." The finish is lost; presumably the potatoes went into the pot with the molasses poured over to bake until the syrup thickened around them. No time or oven temperature survives, and any figure given for them is a modern guess rather than the book's instruction.
- Casserole means the potIn turn-of-the-century usage a casserole generally meant the lidded earthenware or enamelled cast-iron vessel itself rather than a baked assembly. The word does not appear in the surviving text of this recipe. Any covered oven-safe pot serves.
- Half a pint of molassesThe parenthetical is correct: a half pint is one cup. That is a great deal of molasses for four potatoes and gives a dark, aggressively sweet result closer to a dessert. Two-thirds of a cup is nearer modern taste, and unsulphured molasses is generally milder than sulphured.
- "Yellow sweet potatoes"The period distinction was between drier pale-fleshed sweet potatoes and the moist orange kind sold today, often mislabelled yams. Either works; the orange ones are wetter and sweeter, so drain them thoroughly after steaming or the syrup will not cling.
- Steaming with butterSteam only until a knife meets slight resistance, not until fully soft. They finish cooking in the syrup, and potatoes steamed to collapse will fall apart in the casserole.
- YieldNo yield is given; four potatoes would plausibly serve about four as a side dish.
Sweet potatoes stewed or baked in molasses are a long-established American way with the vegetable, and the pairing is a practical one: before refined sugar became cheap, molasses was the household sweetener, sold by the gallon and used everywhere from gingerbread to baked beans. The dish belongs to the same family as the candied sweet potatoes that later migrated onto the Thanksgiving table, though the marshmallow version is a twentieth-century commercial arrival and has nothing to do with this recipe. Its appearance in a casserole-cookery book reflects a specific vogue: around the turn of the century, publishers put out a run of small volumes promoting covered earthenware and enamelled iron pots.