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Southern Sweet Potatoes
Cut cold boiled sweet potatoes in lengthwise slices. Arrange in layers in buttered baking dish. Cover each layer with brown sugar, dot with butter, sprinkle with salt and pepper, add one cup boiling water, and bake in hot oven.
A candied sweet potato assembled from leftovers, with no quantities given beyond the water. The proportions below are a working starting point for a 2-quart dish.
- Oven temperature"Hot oven" in period usage generally means somewhere around 400-450F. The recipe gives no time; roughly 35-45 minutes, until the syrup has thickened and the top edges have caught colour, is a reasonable working figure.
- Quantities to work withFor about 2 lb of cold boiled sweet potatoes (three or four medium), figure on 3/4 cup packed brown sugar and 3 to 4 tablespoons butter distributed across the layers. Serves four to six.
- The one cup of boiling waterThis is what turns the sugar and butter into a basting syrup rather than a dry crust. Add it down the side of the dish so it does not wash the sugar off the top layer, and use boiling water so the dish is not chilled going into a hot oven.
- Cut and boilBoil the potatoes in their skins until barely tender, then cool and peel; slices about 1/2 inch thick hold their shape. Fully soft potatoes collapse into a puree during the second cooking.
- Pepper is not a misprintThe salt and pepper are deliberate and are what distinguish this from a dessert. Use a modest hand with the pepper, but do not omit it.
- BastingSpoon the syrup from the bottom of the dish over the top two or three times during baking. Left alone, the surface slices dry out before the sugar below has reduced.
- Sweet potato, not yamA Southern recipe of this period most likely intends the moist orange-fleshed sweet potato, though drier pale-fleshed varieties were also in use. The orange type is still sold in many American supermarkets under the misleading label "yam"; true yams are a different plant and will not behave the same way.
Candied sweet potatoes of this kind belong to a long American habit of treating the sweet potato as a vegetable that sits comfortably beside sugar, a habit rooted in Southern cooking where the crop was abundant and cane sugar and molasses cheap. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate and cocoa, carries the usual full complement of plain vegetable cookery alongside the confectionery, and this entry is characteristic of the period's brevity: the writer simply assumes cold boiled sweet potatoes are already on hand. The layered sugar-and-butter treatment belongs to the same broad family as the marshmallow-topped casserole, which appears in early twentieth-century promotional cookery once marshmallows became a cheap packaged item.