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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
Boil in salted water 1 quart sweet potatoes until tender; drain and scrape off skins; cut into slices the long way. Grease shallow pan; lay potatoes on evenly; brush with melted drippings or butter; sprinkle with 1/2 cup brown sugar; add 2 tablespoons butter. Bake in hot oven until well browned.
A short recipe that assumes you know what a hot oven is and how much a quart of potatoes weighs. Both are worth pinning down.
- "1 quart sweet potatoes"Most likely measured whole and raw in a quart measure, which comes to something like 1.5 to 2 lb, two or three medium potatoes. Buy by weight and stop worrying about the quart.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. At that heat the sugar and butter caramelize in 20 to 30 minutes; check at 20, since brown sugar goes from glazed to scorched quickly.
- Boil whole, skin afterThe instruction to boil first and then scrape the skins is deliberate: the flesh stays drier and the peel slips off in sheets. Simmer 20-30 minutes depending on size, until a knife slides in with slight resistance rather than to mush, since they still have oven time ahead.
- DrippingsWhatever meat fat the kitchen had saved, bacon or roast pork most likely. It gives the dish a savory edge that butter alone does not. Butter is the fallback the recipe already offers.
- Turn them onceNothing in the original says so, but the sugar melts down and pools. Baste or flip the slices halfway through or only the undersides glaze.
- Sugar quantityHalf a cup of brown sugar to 2 lb of potatoes is on the sweet side of modern taste; a third of a cup still glazes properly.
- YieldServes four to six as a side dish.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great promotional cookbooks of the early twentieth century. Candied or glazed sweet potatoes belong to the tradition of plain American home cooking: sweet potatoes were cheap, stored well through winter in the South and Mid-Atlantic, and took readily to the brown sugar and butter treatment that also went on winter squash and parsnips. The dish is now inseparable from Thanksgiving, though the marshmallow-topped version that dominates modern tables came later, out of confectionery advertising in the 1910s and 1920s; this recipe represents the older and plainer form, where the glaze is simply sugar, fat and oven heat.