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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
Wash and pare six medium-sized potatoes. Cook in boiling salted water until soft. Drain, cut in halves lengthwise, and put in a buttered pan. Make a syrup by boiling three minutes one-half cup sugar and four tablespoons water; add one tablespoon butter. Brush potatoes with syrup and bake until brown, basting twice with remaining syrup.
A simple two-stage method: boil, then glaze in the oven. The only real variables are how far you cook the potatoes at the boiling stage and how hot the oven runs.
- Oven temperatureFannie Farmer gives no setting; the browning stage wants a hot oven, around 400F. At that heat the syrup caramelises in 20 to 30 minutes with two bastings, rather than merely soaking in.
- Don't boil them fully softThe recipe says only 'until soft'; in practice you want them tender enough to pierce but still holding shape, since fully soft halves tend to collapse when you turn and baste them.
- Pare before or afterThe original pares first, which is faster but loses more flesh to the water. Boiling in the skin and slipping the peels off afterwards gives a firmer, less waterlogged potato and works fine with the rest of the method.
- The syrupHalf a cup sugar to four tablespoons water boiled three minutes is a thin syrup, not a caramel; it should still pour freely. The butter goes in after the boiling, as the recipe directs.
- Buttered pan mattersSugar syrup welds to bare metal. Butter the pan generously, or line it, and lift the halves out with a thin spatula while they are still warm.
- YieldSix medium sweet potatoes, halved, serve six as a side dish. The recipe assumes the syrup left after brushing will cover the two bastings.
- A note on the potatoThe recipe does not say which sweet potato is meant, and both the orange-fleshed and the drier, pale-fleshed varieties glaze well; the drier sorts take a little more syrup.
Glazed sweet potatoes belong to a family of American candied-vegetable dishes that were well established by the late nineteenth century, when sugar had become cheap enough to use freely on a plain root vegetable. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book files it among the potatoes rather than the sweets, which reflects how it was served: as a side dish with roast or boiled meat, not as dessert. The method is essentially the same one that later became the holiday casserole, minus the marshmallows, which arrived in American sweet potato cookery in the 1910s. What distinguishes Farmer's version is her characteristic precision about the syrup -- a measured sugar-to-water ratio boiled for a stated three minutes, rather than what is often said to have been the older habit of simply strewing the potatoes with sugar and butter and letting the oven sort it out.