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Sweet Potatoes Candied
Pare sweet potatoes, and cut in one-third inch slices across. Boil ten minutes in boiling salted water to cover, drain. Arrange in a baking-dish, cover with lumps of butter, sprinkle with sugar and put in the oven a few minutes. Just before removing pour over a cup of Jamaica rum.
A very short set of directions that leaves the cook to supply the oven temperature and most of the quantities. The proportions below are the conventional ones for candied sweet potatoes of this period.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A fairly hot oven, around 400F, will let the sugar and butter caramelize in the "few minutes" the recipe allows; at a lower heat the syrup is more likely to melt and pool than to colour.
- Quantities to fill inFor about 2 lb of sweet potatoes (four to five servings), reckon 3 to 4 tablespoons butter and 1/2 to 2/3 cup sugar, either granulated or light brown.
- The parboil is the hingeTen minutes in boiling salted water should leave the slices barely yielding at the edge, not soft. If they are cooked through at this stage they collapse into mash once buttered and heated.
- Slice thicknessOne-third inch is what the original specifies and is worth keeping. Much thicker rounds may not finish in the short bake; thinner ones are more likely to break up in the water.
- A cup of rum is a great dealThe original has it poured over just before the dish comes out of the oven, so onto a hot dish. That much spirit stays raw and thin and swamps the syrup. A quarter cup is closer to modern taste, and it behaves better if warmed and reduced briefly with the pan juices.
- If you set the rum alightNothing here calls for flaming. If you do, pull the dish out of the oven and away from the vent before adding spirit, and never pour from the bottle toward a hot dish.
- Jamaica rumIn 1914 this meant a dark, heavily pot-distilled, molasses-forward rum. A modern light or white rum gives almost none of the intended flavor; use a dark Jamaican-style bottling.
- ServingThis is a side dish in modern terms, four to five portions, and it is at its best straight from the oven while the syrup still clings.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a run of American books that treated dishes without flesh as a practical household matter rather than a moral one, and it includes a "Meat Substitutes" section. Candied sweet potatoes had been standard American cooking for generations by then, the sweet potato being a Southern staple that traveled north as a holiday vegetable; the sugar-and-butter glaze is essentially the same treatment older books gave to carrots and parsnips. The cup of Jamaica rum marks the recipe as pre-Prohibition, and points to the long trade link between the Caribbean sugar islands and American kitchens. Dishes of this kind are often said to have entered the Thanksgiving repertoire through late nineteenth-century magazine cookery columns, though the pairing of sweet potato with sugar is far older than any printed source for it.