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Sweet Potatoes en Brochettte
Wash and pare potatoes, and cut in one-third inch slices. Arrange on skewers in groups of three or four, parboil six minutes, and drain. Brush over with melted butter, sprinkle with brown sugar, and bake in a hot oven until well browned.
A simple side that depends on one thing: the slices must be uniform and only barely parboiled, or the skewers fall apart before they brown. Everything else is butter, sugar and heat.
- "Hot oven"In period usage this generally means somewhere around 400-450F. The sugar needs real heat to caramelize in the short time the potatoes are in the oven.
- SkewersThe recipe does not specify a material. Metal skewers conduct heat into the slices and can go straight into boiling water. Bamboo works but soak it 30 minutes and expect scorched ends; metal is easier here.
- The parboil is the hingeSix minutes at a simmer leaves the slices firm enough to stay threaded. Take them further and they split around the skewer in the oven. Test with a knife tip: it should meet resistance in the center.
- Slice thicknessOne-third inch is about 8 mm, and consistency matters more than the exact number. Uneven slices finish at different times and the thin ones burn.
- Butter and sugarRoughly 2 tablespoons melted butter and 2 tablespoons brown sugar per pound of potatoes. Brush and sprinkle again halfway through baking; the first coat mostly runs off.
- Pan setupRest the skewers across the rim of a shallow pan or on a rack over a rimmed sheet so the slices are not sitting in melted sugar, which scorches on contact with the metal.
- Timing and yieldExpect 20-25 minutes in the oven, turning the skewers once. Two pounds of sweet potatoes gives four to six servings alongside a roast.
"En brochette" simply means on a skewer, and its appearance in an American cookbook of this period reflects the French kitchen vocabulary that Boston Cooking School instruction leaned on for even the plainest vegetable. Sweet potatoes themselves were a long-established staple, and nineteenth-century American cooks often paired them with sugar or molasses in the same way they treated squash; the brown-sugar glaze here is the domesticated version of the candied sweet potato that would become a holiday fixture. The skewer is doing practical work rather than decorative work: threading the slices lets them be lifted out of the parboiling water in a group and turned in the oven without breaking, a technique often associated with grilling meat and here applied to a vegetable that falls apart easily once cooked through.