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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Prepare and bake same as white potatoes.
Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style Bake six medium-sized sweet potatoes, remove from oven, cut in halves lengthwise, and scoop out inside. Mash, add two tablespoons butter, and cream to moisten. Season with salt and Sherry wine. Refill skins and bake five minutes in a hot oven.
Two recipes run together here: a bare cross-reference for plain baked sweet potatoes, and a stuffed version in the style Fannie Farmer's era called Southern. The second is essentially a twice-baked potato with sherry in place of the usual sugar.
- The missing first step"Prepare and bake same as white potatoes" means scrub the potatoes and bake them whole. The book gives no temperature and no timing here; medium sweet potatoes generally want something like 45 minutes to an hour in a hot oven, until a knife slides through with no resistance.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figures for its oven terms; a hot or quick oven is conventionally read as somewhere around 400 to 450F. The final five-minute bake is only to set and lightly brown the tops.
- Scoop while hotThe hinge of the dish. Halve and empty the potatoes as soon as they come out of the oven; cooled sweet potato flesh turns gluey and clings to the skin, and the skins themselves tear more readily once they slacken.
- Cream to moistenCream here means heavy or light cream rather than half-and-half or milk, and no quantity is given. Sweet potatoes vary enormously in moisture; start with two tablespoons and stop while the mash still holds a shape.
- The sherryNo amount is given. One to two tablespoons for six potatoes is enough to read as sherry, and the alcohol will not fully cook off in five minutes. A dry or medium sherry suits better than a cream sherry, since the potatoes bring their own sweetness.
- Sweet potato vs. yamIn most American supermarkets, produce labeled yam is in fact sweet potato. Look for the orange, moist-fleshed kind rather than the pale, dry-fleshed sort, which mashes stiff and takes more cream.
- YieldSix potatoes give twelve filled halves, or six servings as a side dish. The filling can be mashed and the skins refilled several hours ahead, then given the final bake before serving.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats the sweet potato as a minor member of the potato chapter, subordinate to the white potato it is measured against. The label "Southern Style" on the stuffed version may suggest the dish's associations, though what the phrase signaled to Northern readers of the period is not something the page settles. The sherry is a genteel touch of the same sort that turns up in the book's puddings and sauces, where a small measure of wine did the work later cooks would give to vanilla or brown sugar. Twice-baked potatoes of this general kind, scooped, enriched, and returned to their skins, make a plain root vegetable fit for company.