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Mashed Sweet Potatoes
To two cups riced sweet potatoes add three tablespoons butter, one-half teaspoon salt, and hot milk to moisten. Beat until light, and pile on a vegetable dish.
Sweet Potatoes, Georgian Style Season mashed boiled sweet potatoes with butter, salt, pepper, and Sherry wine. Moisten with cream, and beat five minutes. Put in a buttered baking-dish, leaving a rough surface. Pour over a syrup made by boiling two tablespoons molasses and one teaspoon butter five minutes. Bake in the oven until delicately browned.
Two related preparations run together in one paragraph: a plain mash and a richer baked version. The second gives almost no quantities, so treat it as a ratio to build by taste.
- Riced, not mashed"Riced" means pushed through a ricer or food mill while hot, which is why the result beats up light. Two cups of riced sweet potato is roughly a pound of potatoes before cooking.
- Hot milkThe milk must be hot or the mash cools and stiffens as you beat. Add it a tablespoon at a time; sweet potatoes hold far less liquid than white ones and turn soupy quickly.
- Three tablespoons butterThat is generous by modern habit but consistent with the texture intended here.
- The Georgian version's missing amountsFor 2 cups of mash, start with 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons Sherry, and 3 to 4 tablespoons cream, then adjust. Use a dry or medium Sherry rather than the salted cooking Sherry sold with the vinegars.
- Beat five minutesBy hand this was real work; a stand mixer with the paddle does it in two to three minutes. The point is aeration, so stop once it lightens rather than running it to a paste.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; home ranges of the period rarely had a reliable oven thermometer, and the book works by description instead. Bake at 375F for 25 to 30 minutes; the rough surface peaks brown while the interior heats through.
- The molasses syrupBoil the 2 tablespoons molasses with 1 teaspoon butter only until it thickens slightly, about the stated five minutes over low heat. Molasses scorches fast and turns bitter, and the burnt flavour carries through the whole dish.
- Leave the surface roughThis is the hinge of the baked version. Smoothing the top gives you an even, pale surface; peaks and ridges catch the syrup and take the colour.
Sweet potatoes occupy an odd position in a Boston cookbook of this period: a Southern and Caribbean staple, familiar in New England mainly as a winter market vegetable and a holiday side. The "Georgian Style" heading may reflect what is often said to have been a late-nineteenth-century habit of labelling a dish by region when it used ingredients associated with that place, here molasses and Sherry, both long-standing Atlantic trade goods. Farmer's habit of pairing a plain version with an enriched one is characteristic of the book, which was written for cooking-school students learning a base method first and then variations on it. Whether any Georgia household would have recognised the recipe is another matter; regional names in these volumes are generally best read as marketing rather than documentation.