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Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Wash and scrub those of a uniform size; do not cut or scratch the skin. Put them in a baking-pan, place them in a hot oven and bake until when pressed with the hands they seem mellow in the centre. Do not pierce them with a fork; serve them in their jackets. Roasted potatoes must, of course, be served at once when taken from the oven, or they become heavy.
A method rather than a formula, and one that still holds up. The only variables are oven heat, size and timing.
- "Hot oven"In period terms roughly 400-425F. As the flesh heats, some starch converts to sugar, and the dry heat of the oven concentrates what is there.
- Uniform sizeThe instruction is not fussiness. Medium potatoes of about 8 oz each will be done together in 45-60 minutes; mix in a large one and it will still be firm at the core when the others have collapsed.
- Do not pierceThe book says this twice over, first as not cutting or scratching the skin. An intact skin holds the steam in and the flesh cooks moist. Test as directed, by squeezing, with a cloth in your hand.
- Line the panSweet potatoes leak sugar syrup that carbonises on a bare pan. Parchment or foil saves scrubbing; the original says nothing about it.
- "Heavy" on standingAs the potato cools the starch sets and the flesh gets denser. The advice to serve straight from the oven is sound; reheating does not fully restore the texture.
- YieldOne medium potato per person, two if they are small. No seasoning is given at all; butter, salt and pepper at table are the obvious dressing.
American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries print roasting in the skin briefly, as though everyone already knew it. The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas, no relation to the ordinary potato) was long a staple of the South before it became a national side dish. The insistence on serving at once, and on the intact jacket, belongs to a period when kitchen writers were codifying habits that had been passed on by demonstration -- though the book states the rule without giving a reason for it.