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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Prepare in the same way as white potatoes and bake by same method. They will cook in about the same time.
A cross-reference entry rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you back to the book's fireless-cooker instructions for white potatoes. The method it assumes is worth spelling out, since almost no modern kitchen has the equipment.
- What a fireless cooker wasIf this entry does point back to fireless-cookery instructions, the device was an insulated box, variously packed with felt, asbestos or hay, into which iron or soapstone discs ("radiants") heated on the range were dropped. Food went in with the radiants, the lid was clamped down, and the stored heat did the cooking with no further fuel. Baking, as opposed to stewing, depended on those radiants.
- "Prepare in the same way"The entry leaves the details to the book's earlier white-potato instructions; for potatoes this ordinarily means scrub well, cut out any blemishes and dry them.
- TimingThe entry gives no time, only that sweet potatoes take about as long as white ones; it also gives no test for doneness.
- Oven equivalentA conventional oven does this better: 400F for 45 to 60 minutes for medium potatoes, until a skewer slides through with no resistance. Sweet potatoes are done when the flesh has gone translucent and slightly syrupy, not merely soft.
- Sweet potatoes leakUnlike white potatoes, they weep sugar that caramelises and burns. Bake them on a lined sheet or a piece of foil rather than directly on a rack or the floor of a cooker.
- VarietyThe sweet potato a cook of this period bought may well have been a drier, paler, less sugary type than the deep-orange "yam"-labelled Beauregard or Garnet sold now; those later varieties cook a little faster and finish sweeter and moister.
- YieldThe entry gives none. Count one medium potato (8 to 10 oz) per person as a side dish.
Fireless cookery had a genuine vogue in American households in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period carried sections on it. The insulated cooker was sold on fuel economy and on freeing the cook from tending a range in a hot kitchen; food was brought to temperature on the stove or heated by soapstone radiants, then sealed in a box to finish on stored heat, much as a modern haybox or thermal cooker works. Wartime fuel conservation campaigns gave the devices a further push. Sweet potatoes were an obvious candidate for the treatment: cheap, long-keeping, and requiring nothing but sustained dry heat. The brevity of this entry reflects a book that cross-references a neighbouring page rather than repeating a method.