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Browned Sweet Potatoes
After the potatoes have been boiled and dried in the oven, remove the skins and cut into halves. Put three tablespoonfuls of drippings in a large frying-pan. Dust the potatoes with salt, pepper and sugar, put them into the hot fat and turn carefully until browned on both sides. Serve very hot.
MASHED SWEET POTATOES, Southern Style.
Boil dry and skin six good-sized sweets. Mash them fine, add two tablespoonfuls of butter, four tablespoonfuls of sugar, a half teaspoonful of salt, beat until light. Put them into a baking-dish and when there is enough, smooth over the top. Brush with milk, and bake in a moderate oven until a light brown. Serve as a separate course by itself.
Two related dishes, both starting from sweet potatoes boiled in their skins. The hinge is the drying step: potatoes that go into hot fat wet will steam rather than brown, and mashed potatoes made from waterlogged flesh will never beat up light.
- "Boiled and dried in the oven"Boil whole and unpeeled until tender, drain, then set them on a rack or dry pan in a slow-to-moderate oven for a short spell until the surfaces look matte and floury. The original specifies neither temperature nor time. The drying step matters in both recipes.
- DrippingsBacon fat or rendered beef or pork drippings. Butter, lard, or a neutral oil all work; butter alone will scorch at browning heat unless you add a little oil.
- Moderate oven350F. The mashed dish only needs 20-30 minutes at that heat, since everything in it is already cooked; you are setting the top and taking colour.
- "When there is enough"Ambiguous in the original, and probably means simply when the dish is filled to the depth you want. Read it as: pile the mash into the baking dish, level the top, and stop.
- Sugar in the mashFour tablespoons for six good-sized potatoes, call it two to three pounds of flesh, so the result is sweet but not a dessert. Modern orange-fleshed sweet potatoes may be sweeter than some older varieties, so taste before adding all of it.
- Salt, pepper and sugar on the fried halvesDust lightly and just before they hit the fat. Sugar on the cut face is what gives the browning its lacquer, but it burns quickly, so keep the pan at a steady medium rather than fierce heat.
- YieldThe mashed dish serves six as a side, or four if you follow the instruction to serve it alone as a course. The browned halves scale to whatever fits the pan in a single layer without crowding.
Sweet potatoes cooked twice -- boiled, then browned in fat or baked with butter and sugar -- run through nineteenth-century American cookery, and the label "Southern style" on the mashed version reflects where the crop was most heavily grown and eaten rather than any single fixed recipe. Sweet potatoes are not related to the white potato; they were a staple field crop across the South and were commonly stored through winter in earth banks or dry cellars, which may be one reason so many recipes begin with boiling whole tubers rather than peeling raw ones. The instruction to serve the mashed dish "as a separate course by itself" belongs to the era's habit of course-by-course service, in which a single well-made vegetable could stand alone between the meat and the sweet.