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Sweet Potato with Pineapple
6 small sweet potatoes 1/3 as much pineapple as potato 1/3 cup honey 1/4 cup water Boil the potatoes with the skins on. When cool, peel and cut them in pieces one-quarter of an inch thick. Mix honey and hot water. Just cover the bottom of a baking-dish with the mixture, add a layer of sweet potatoes with sliced pineapple. Pour the remaining honey mixture over them and bake for ten minutes in the oven.
A simple honey-glazed scalloped dish that depends on the potatoes being fully cooked before they ever reach the baking-dish. The oven stage is only to set the glaze.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives no number. Ten minutes is only enough to warm through and bubble the syrup, so a hot oven (in modern terms somewhere around 375-400F) is a reasonable guess rather than anything the recipe specifies.
- Boil the potatoes in their skinsThis is the hinge. Skin-on boiling keeps them from waterlogging, and the skins slip off easily once cool. Cook until a knife goes through with no resistance, about 25-35 minutes depending on size.
- "1/3 as much pineapple as potato"The original does not say whether this is by volume or by weight. Read as volume, six small sweet potatoes would want somewhere in the region of a cup of sliced pineapple.
- Pineapple choiceCanned sliced pineapple in syrup, drained, was widely available at the time and would suit the recipe. Fresh works and is less sweet; if using canned in juice rather than syrup you may want the full 1/3 cup honey.
- Honey and waterWhisk the honey into the hot water until it flows freely, otherwise it sits in the bottom of the dish rather than coating the layers.
- Dish sizeUse a shallow baking-dish about 8 inches square so the syrup stays in contact with the potatoes rather than pooling under a deep pile.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish. If you want browned edges, run it under the broiler for a minute or two after baking.
Sweet potato baked with a sweet fruit and a syrup is a persistent American side dish, and this version belongs to the period when canned Hawaiian pineapple had become cheap and widely distributed in the continental United States. Honey rather than brown sugar or marshmallow fits a strand of late-1920s domestic-science writing that treated honey as the more wholesome sweetener. The dish also solves a practical problem for the home cook: boiled sweet potatoes left from an earlier meal can be sliced and reassembled into something that reads as a deliberate holiday side rather than a leftover.