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Candied Sweet Potatoes
6 large sweet potatoes 1 C brown sugar 1/2 C water 1 t salt 1 T butter Wash potatoes, cook in boiling water until tender. Drain and peel when cool enough to handle. Cut in slices lengthwise, three-fourths of an inch thick. Make syrup by boiling the sugar, butter and water five minutes. Lay in a pan, sprinkle with salt and pour the syrup over them. Cook in a moderate oven until brown, basting frequently. 731 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Blue Ribbon Filling Station
A straightforward church-supper recipe that assumes you know what a moderate oven is and how long a sweet potato takes. A few specifics fill the gaps.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350-375F. At that heat the syrup reduces and colors without scorching; figure roughly 30 to 45 minutes, basting every 10 minutes or so.
- Measurement shorthandC is cup, t is teaspoon, T is tablespoon. So: 1 cup brown sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon butter.
- Do not overboil the potatoesThis is the hinge. "Tender" here means just yielding to a knife, not soft — the slices go into the oven for another half hour and fall apart if they started out fully cooked. Pull them a few minutes early.
- Slice thicknessThree-quarters of an inch is deliberate. Thinner slices collapse under repeated basting; keep them thick and lay them in a single layer in a shallow pan so the syrup reaches everything.
- The syrupFive minutes of boiling gives a thin syrup, not a caramel. It will look loose when poured over; it thickens in the oven as the water drives off. Resist the urge to reduce it further on the stove.
- Basting mattersWithout it the exposed tops dry out and the syrup at the pan bottom burns. If the pan runs dry before the potatoes brown, add a spoonful of water rather than more sugar.
- SaltA full teaspoon over six potatoes is right for the sweetness, but it is sprinkled directly on the slices, so distribute it evenly rather than dumping it in one corner.
- YieldSix large sweet potatoes should serve roughly six to eight as a side dish, depending on the size of the potatoes.
Candied sweet potatoes are an American dish built on two cheap staples — sweet potatoes, long grown across the South and shipped north in quantity by the late nineteenth century, and brown sugar. Versions using boiled-then-baked potatoes in a sugar syrup appear in community and commercial cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, well before the marshmallow-topped casserole that came to dominate mid-century holiday tables. What makes this particular entry worth a second look is the credit line: 731 N. Milwaukee Ave., Blue Ribbon Filling Station. Compiled community cookbooks of this era were often funded in part by selling advertising space to local businesses. A filling station appearing in a fundraising cookbook, with a recipe on the page rather than a slogan, is a small snapshot of how these books tied their compilers to the local main street.