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Sugar Potatoes or Candied Yams
6 sweet potatoes 1 cup white sugar 1/4 cup water 1 teaspoon butter Parboil, peel and cut potatoes in 1/4 in. slices. Cook other ingredients to form syrup. Place slices of potato in syrup and simmer gently for 1 hour, then let syrup boil away until it is almost dry. Serve with meats. Serves 6.
A stovetop candied sweet potato that never sees the oven. The whole dish turns on the final stage, where the syrup reduces almost dry and can scorch in under a minute.
- Watch the reductionOnce the water has cooked off, sugar left in a thin film goes from amber to burnt very quickly. Stay at the pan for the last few minutes and pull it off the heat while the slices are still glossy.
- Parboil means partly cookedBoil the whole unpeeled potatoes about 15 minutes, until a knife enters the outer flesh but the centre is still firm. Fully cooked potatoes will collapse in the syrup.
- Yams and sweet potatoesDespite the title, the recipe calls for sweet potatoes, and orange-fleshed varieties sold as "yams" in American markets are sweet potatoes. A true yam is a drier, starchier tropical tuber and behaves differently here.
- The hour is longQuarter-inch slices of already-parboiled potato are tender in 20 to 30 minutes of gentle simmering. An hour will leave you turning candied slices into a sweet mash unless the heat is very low and you barely disturb them.
- Pan and liquid levelUse a wide skillet or sauté pan so the slices sit in one or two layers. One cup sugar to a quarter cup water makes very little syrup for six potatoes; add water a spoonful at a time if the pan threatens to dry out before the potatoes are tender.
- ButterOne teaspoon is token seasoning by modern standards. Two to three tablespoons, stirred in at the end, gives a buttery glaze closer to what modern candied sweet potato recipes usually call for.
- ServingServes six as a side. Turn the slices in the pan syrup and serve at once; the glaze stiffens and dulls as it cools.
Candied sweet potatoes belong to a family of American sugar-and-butter vegetable dishes that spread through published cookery in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, once refined white sugar became cheap enough to use by the cupful on a vegetable. The stovetop method here appears to be the older of the two approaches: slices simmered in syrup on the range, rather than the casserole baked with marshmallows, a pairing promoted in marshmallow manufacturers' recipe booklets from the late 1910s onward. Sweet potatoes have a long association with the American winter holiday table, where they arrive as a sweet dish served alongside roast meat rather than as dessert.