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Boiled Sweet Potatoes
Select potatoes of uniform size. Wash, pare, and cook twenty minutes in boiling salted water to cover. Many boil sweet potatoes with the skins on.
A three-sentence recipe from Fannie Farmer that assumes you know the rest. The only variables are size and doneness.
- Twenty minutes is a starting pointTwenty minutes suits peeled pieces or small potatoes about 2 inches thick. A whole medium sweet potato, skin on, wants 30-40 minutes. Test with a paring knife at the thickest part rather than trusting the clock.
- Uniform size is the actual instructionThe first line is doing the work. Mixed sizes in one pot means some pieces collapse while others stay hard. Cut larger potatoes down to match the smaller ones.
- "Pare" means peelIn Farmer's day with a paring knife; a vegetable peeler loses less flesh. The book notes only that many cook them in the skins; cooking in the skin does tend to give drier, less watery flesh, and the skins slip off while hot.
- Salted waterThe book gives no proportion; a tablespoon of salt per 4 quarts is a reasonable modern figure. Potatoes boiled in the skin take up very little salt, so salt them again after peeling.
- Water is the weaknessBoiling leaches some sugar and flavor into the pot. Steaming over an inch of water is often reckoned to give a sweeter result with the same equipment.
- YieldAllow one medium potato, about 6-8 oz, per person. Serve immediately with butter and salt, or use as the base for other sweet potato dishes.
Sweet potatoes and white potatoes appear near one another in this chapter, but they are unrelated plants: the sweet potato is a morning-glory relative from tropical America, the white potato a nightshade from the Andes. In turn-of-the-century American cookery sweet potatoes were more strongly associated with the South and with autumn markets, and some Northern cookbooks treated them only briefly. The terseness here is in keeping with the book's vegetable chapters, where boiling is given once as a foundation and other treatments follow.