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Honey
Boil 6 sweet potatoes and cut each lengthwise in 2 or 3 slices. Pour about 1/2 cup honey into a pan until the bottom is covered about 1/4 inch deep. Let this become very hot, put in the sweet potatoes, and cook about 10 minutes.
The grape sugar in the honey combined with the dextrin in the sweet potato gives a delicious nutlike flavor to potatoes cooked in this manner. The honey must be hot when the sweet potatoes are put in, as too long cooking destroys the flavor. Serve with butter and salt.
A candied sweet potato with no sugar, no water and no oven — the honey itself is the cooking medium. The whole thing hinges on getting the honey hot before the potatoes go in and pulling them out before it scorches.
- Heat the honey firstThe instruction to have the honey "very hot" before adding the potatoes is the point of the recipe: the slices sear and glaze rather than stew. Honey darkens and turns bitter quickly once it is hot, so use a wide heavy pan over medium heat and watch the color, not the clock.
- Ten minutes is a maximumThe potatoes are already fully cooked from boiling; the second cooking is only to glaze. Turn the slices once, and if the honey starts to smell sharp or smoke, stop — burnt honey cannot be rescued.
- Boil the potatoes in their skinsThe original does not say either way, but boiling whole and unpeeled is the usual method: cook until just tender, 25–40 minutes depending on size, then cool enough to slip the skins off before slicing. Thin slices will collapse in the honey; the recipe's two or three lengthwise cuts give thick ones.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup of honey covering a pan bottom a quarter inch deep implies a pan of roughly 6 inches. Six sweet potatoes cut in two or three slices each will not fit in one layer in that pan — work in batches rather than crowding, or the slices steam instead of glazing.
- On the "grape sugar" and "dextrin"Period food-science language. Grape sugar is glucose, and dextrin is a starch breakdown product that does form in sweet potatoes as they cook. The nutty flavor is real, but it comes from browning reactions between those sugars and the potato's proteins, not from the two substances combining as the writer imagined.
- Honey choiceA mild clover or orange-blossom honey lets the potato through. Buckwheat or a dark wildflower honey will dominate.
- YieldSix sweet potatoes serve six to eight as a side dish. Serve immediately — the glaze stiffens to candy as it cools and the slices weld to the plate.
Sweet potatoes candied in sugar and butter were a fixture of American cooking well before this book appeared, and honey versions sit alongside a broader promotional effort: in the early twentieth century beekeepers' associations and honey producers circulated recipe leaflets arguing that honey could replace refined sugar in nearly any dish, often with the sort of confident nutritional-chemistry explanation offered here. The title "Honey" rather than the name of the dish suggests a set organized by ingredient rather than by course, though the source of this particular recipe is not known.