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Browned Sweet Potatoes
Peel the sweet potatoes, and toss into cold water immediately to prevent discoloration. Cut in halves lengthwise. Cook in boiling salted water or steam until tender. Drain, and place in a buttered dripping pan. Brush the tops of the potatoes with butter. Sprinkle slightly with sugar. Place in a hot oven, and bake until browned.
A short recipe that assumes you know what a dripping pan and a hot oven are. The variables worth pinning down are oven heat, how far to boil the potatoes, and how much sugar is "slightly."
- Hot ovenPeriod sources generally put a hot oven somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat the buttered, sugared tops should brown in roughly 15-20 minutes; check early, since sugar can scorch quickly.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan, the kind that sat under a joint to catch fat. A rimmed sheet pan is the direct equivalent. Use one large enough that the halves sit in a single layer with space between them, or they steam instead of browning.
- Don't cook them fully softThe recipe says to boil or steam until tender, but stopping while a knife still meets slight resistance at the centre makes the halves easier to move into the pan without collapsing.
- Cut side down or upThe recipe does not say. If the halves are laid cut-side down, "the tops" would be the rounded backs; laid cut-side up, the flat face takes the butter and sugar. Either reading is possible.
- How much sugarThe recipe gives no quantity; a teaspoon or so scattered thinly over four halves suits "sprinkle slightly." A darker sugar would give more colour than white. The point is a thin glaze rather than a candied dish.
- The cold water stepStill worth doing. Peeled sweet potato darkens within minutes from enzymatic browning, and a bowl of cold water holds the colour while you work through the rest.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Figure roughly one medium potato, halved, per person, and serve immediately, since the browned surface softens as it stands.
Sweet potatoes had been a staple of American cooking long before vegetarian cookery books took them up, roasted in ashes, baked in their skins, or parboiled and browned in the fat of a roasting joint. The interest of this version is that the fat is butter rather than pan drippings, which is exactly the substitution that defines the genre: Meatless Cookery and its contemporaries, published in years when meat conservation was often an economic and a patriotic concern, and around the First World War especially so, took established dishes and reworked whatever depended on animal flesh. The dripping pan named in the method is a small fossil of that older practice, a vessel whose whole purpose was to catch meat fat, here pressed into service with no meat anywhere near it. The sprinkle of sugar reflects a long American habit of pushing the sweet potato toward the dessert end of the table, a tendency also visible in the marshmallow-topped casseroles that appeared around 1917, contemporary with this genre rather than a later development.