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Candied Sweet Potatoes
Cut boiled sweet potatoes into long slices; place them in an earthen dish; butter each and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until the sugar and butter have candied and the potatoes are brown.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already have cold boiled sweet potatoes on hand and a hot oven going. The only real decisions are thickness, oven heat and how long you let the sugar go.
- The hinge: dry potatoes, thick slicesBoil the potatoes in their skins, drain well and let them cool before peeling and slicing, or they collapse in the dish. Slices lengthwise about half an inch thick hold their shape and still brown at the edges.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 400F; the sugar and butter need real heat to reduce to a syrup and catch on the potato rather than just melt into a puddle. Figure 25 to 35 minutes, turning the slices once.
- "Earthen dish"A glazed earthenware or stoneware baking dish. Any shallow ceramic or glass dish works; avoid thin metal, which scorches the sugar before the potatoes brown.
- QuantitiesNone are given, which is normal for this style of book. For six medium sweet potatoes, about 4 tablespoons butter and 1/2 to 3/4 cup brown or white sugar coats them without swimming.
- "Candied" means what it saysWatch the last ten minutes. The syrup goes from thin to thick to bitter quickly, and once the sugar smokes at the edges of the dish the whole pan tastes scorched.
- ArrangementA single overlapping layer browns; a deep pile steams. Use a wider dish rather than a deeper one.
- YieldSix medium potatoes serves six as a side dish. It reheats acceptably, though the candied surface softens.
Sweet potatoes had long been a staple of the American South, and candied sweet potatoes appear in American cookbooks as a standard vegetable side rather than a dessert. The technique is straightforward frugality: boiled potatoes, butter and sugar, and a hot oven. The terseness here is characteristic: the book expects a cook who knows what a candied surface looks like and needs only the order of operations.