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Browned Sweet Potatoes
Cut cold boiled sweet potatoes in lengthwise slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Brush with butter and sprinkle with brown sugar. Brown in hot oven.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already have boiled sweet potatoes in the pantry, which most households of 1907 did. The only judgement calls are slice thickness and oven heat.
- "Hot oven"Period cookbooks vary, but a hot or quick oven is generally taken as somewhere in the 400-450F range. The book gives no figure. The heat is there to brown the sugared surface quickly rather than to cook the already-boiled potato through.
- Start with underdone potatoesBoil the potatoes until just tender and no further, then chill them thoroughly. Fully soft potatoes fall apart under the knife and will not hold a slice.
- Slice thicknessLengthwise slices of about half an inch hold their shape and give an edge to brown. Thin slices curl and burn at the sugar's expense.
- Butter first, sugar secondThe order in the original matters. Butter brushed on gives the sugar something to cling to and something to caramelize in; sugar scattered on dry potato scorches in patches.
- Sugar quantityNone is given. A teaspoon of brown sugar spread over a single layer in a shallow pan is enough for color and gloss; more turns the dish into candied sweet potatoes, which is a different recipe.
- Pan and turningThe recipe specifies no pan. A shallow buttered pan with the slices in one layer, not overlapping, suits the method; ten to fifteen minutes is usually enough, and the slices can be left unturned if the top is browning evenly.
- YieldNone is given. Three medium sweet potatoes would make roughly four modest servings as a side dish.
This is leftover cookery, and the book makes no apology for it. Sweet potatoes were sold by the peck in American markets through the autumn and winter. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, so the volume is best known for its chocolate and cocoa chapters; the vegetable section is plain New England housekeeping of the sort found in the Boston Cooking School tradition. The pairing of sweet potato with brown sugar and butter reads as a holiday flourish now, but here it belongs to the business of making a reheated vegetable worth putting on the table.