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Sweet Potatoes
Boil sweet potatoes as you would Irish potatoes. Drain, mash, season with sugar and butter and a little cinnamon or any kind of spice you may like. Put in pan. Run in stove to brown and serve. Sprinkle top with ground almonds and bits of butter. Stale cake crumbs ground and browned make them nice.
A brief, loosely written casserole of mashed sweet potatoes finished under heat. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so a few anchors help.
- "Irish potatoes"Simply the ordinary white potato, distinguished here from the sweet. Boil the sweet potatoes whole and unpeeled in salted water until a knife slides through, 25-40 minutes depending on size, then slip the skins off while warm.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. "Run in stove to brown" points to a short spell in a hot oven rather than a long bake; something like 400-425F for 20-25 minutes should do, or a few minutes under the broiler if the mash goes in already hot.
- Seasoning quantitiesFor 3 lb sweet potatoes, start with 3-4 tablespoons butter, 2-3 tablespoons sugar, a scant teaspoon cinnamon and a good pinch of salt. Sugared sweet potato dishes of this kind can end up close to a dessert; taste and stop well short of that if you are serving it with meat.
- ConsistencyBoiled sweet potatoes hold a lot of water. Drain thoroughly and let them steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing, or the casserole will be loose and will not brown.
- Ground almondsAlmond meal or finely chopped blanched almonds both work. Scatter them on only for the last ten minutes, since they scorch quickly at browning heat.
- Stale cake crumbsA frugal use for leftovers. Dry the crumbs in a low oven first, then toss with melted butter; if the cake you are using is a sweet one, cut the sugar in the mash accordingly.
- YieldThree pounds of sweet potatoes fills a 2-quart dish and serves six to eight as a side.
Mrs. Wilson wrote for American households during and just after the First World War, and her books push cheap starches and the reuse of leftovers hard. This entry shows both habits at once: the sweet potato, abundant and inexpensive in the South and along the Atlantic coast, and stale cake ground into crumbs rather than thrown out. Spiced and candied sweet potato dishes were already familiar in American cookery by this point. The instructions' vagueness is typical of the period's cookery writing, where a recipe was a reminder for a cook who already knew the method.