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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Wash and scrub potatoes of a uniform size. Do not break the skins, put them in a kettle of boiling water and boil until, when pierced with a fork, they seem a little hard in the centre. Drain, put them in a baking-pan, run them in a hot oven for about fifteen minutes. In this way the potatoes become mealy and dry. Remove the skins when baked and serve in an uncovered dish.
A two-stage method — parboil, then finish dry in the oven — that fixes the usual problem with sweet potatoes, which is a wet, sticky interior. A few of the terms need translating.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 425–450°F. The oven's only job here is to drive off surface moisture in fifteen minutes, so it needs to be fully preheated before the pan goes in.
- The hinge: undercook the boilPull them while the fork still meets resistance at the centre. If they are boiled through, the oven stage cannot dry them out and you get a soggy potato with a slack skin.
- Uniform size matters more than it soundsBecause the boiling time is judged by feel on one potato, mismatched sizes mean some will collapse while others stay raw. Choose tubers within a few ounces of each other, or cut nothing and simply cook the big ones separately.
- "Run them in"Period shorthand for slide the pan into the oven. No greasing, no covering — dry heat and bare metal are the point.
- Don't pierce before boilingThe intact skin keeps water out. Prick or cut them and the flesh takes on liquid, which is exactly what the recipe is working against.
- PeelingThe skins slip off easily while the potatoes are hot; a clean cloth or paper towel gives enough grip. They tighten and tear once cooled.
- Uncovered dishNot fussiness — a lid traps steam and undoes the drying. Serve them hot.
- YieldThe original gives none. Reckon one medium potato (6–8 oz) per person, two for larger appetites.
Sweet potatoes were a staple of American cooking long before they were a holiday side dish, and nineteenth-century household books often seem to treat them as a plain vegetable to be boiled, baked or fried in slices — sugar, marshmallow and casserole treatments belong largely to the twentieth century. The parboil-then-bake technique here reflects a common complaint of the period: sweet potatoes were often described as "watery" or "soggy" compared with the mealy white potato, and cooks looked for ways to make them dry and floury instead. The word "mealy" was high praise in these books, applied to potatoes, chestnuts and beans alike. It also sits apart from the American habit of calling the orange-fleshed varieties "yams," a name borrowed from an unrelated African tuber and generally associated with Louisiana growers in the 1930s; a cookbook of this vintage saying "sweet potato" may mean either the drier pale-fleshed sort or the moist orange one, and the drying step suits both.