Home › Vegetables › Fried Sweet Potatoes
Fried Sweet Potatoes
Wash and cut small uncooked sweet potatoes into quarters; dry them and lower them into boiling hot fat. Brown thoroughly; remove with a skimmer; drain and dry on paper: sprinkle with salt and serve.
A one-step deep fry with no temperature given, which is where the whole thing turns. Sweet potatoes are dense and sugary, so quarters of even a small potato need gentler heat than the "boiling hot fat" of the original suggests.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives no number. "Boiling hot fat" in period usage generally meant a fat hot enough to brown a cube of bread quickly, somewhere in the region of 360-375F. For raw quarters it is safer to hold nearer 325-340F: the sugars in sweet potato scorch before the interior is tender at higher heat.
- Cut size matters more than the recipe admitsQuarters of even a small potato can be an inch or so thick and may need upwards of ten minutes. If your potatoes are supermarket-large, cut to wedges no thicker than about three-quarters of an inch or the outsides will be dark before the centres soften.
- Dry them properlyThis is the hinge. Surface water on a wet-cut root vegetable makes hot fat erupt. Pat each piece dry with a towel and lower them in a few at a time rather than tipping in a bowlful.
- Choice of fatThe recipe does not say what fat to use; lard or beef drippings would have been the usual household options. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works — peanut, sunflower, refined canola. Do not use butter.
- "Brown thoroughly"Colour alone is not doneness here. Test one piece with a skewer; it should slide through with no resistance at the centre before you pull the batch.
- Draining"Dry on paper" is sound, but drain on a rack over paper rather than sitting the pieces directly on it, or the undersides steam and go limp.
- Salt and yieldSalt while the pieces are still glossy with fat so it sticks. Two medium sweet potatoes, about a pound, serve three or four as a side.
Sweet potatoes were a staple long before white potatoes in much of the American South, and turn up in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century vegetable chapters roasted in ashes, boiled, candied in syrup, and — as here — simply cut and dropped in the fat kettle. Deep frying was routine in a household that rendered its own lard, which is part of why a recipe like this can run to three sentences. The instruction to fry them raw rather than parboiled is worth noting. Mrs. Fryer's book was issued in a loose-leaf format.