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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
6 sweet potatoes
1 cup brown sugar
Salt and pepper
¼ cup water
Butter
Boil the potatoes without paring them, and, when tender, drain and strip off the skins. Make a thick sirup of the sugar and water. Cut each potato in half, dip it in the sirup, lay in a baking-dish, season each piece with salt and pepper, a bit of butter. Bake in a quick oven until the potatoes are brown. They will brown quickly.
A straightforward candied sweet potato that relies on a boil-then-glaze method rather than a long braise in syrup. Two details need translating: the oven and the syrup.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-425F on a modern dial. The sugar coating colors fast at that heat, and the recipe's warning that they brown quickly is accurate; watch them rather than trusting a set time.
- The syrupOne cup brown sugar to a quarter cup water is a heavy syrup. Bring it to a boil and let it reduce a minute or two until it coats a spoon; if it goes past the soft-ball stage it will set hard on the potatoes rather than glaze them.
- Boiling in the skinsCooking unpeeled keeps the flesh from waterlogging and the skins slip off under cold running water. Test with a skewer at about 25-35 minutes depending on size; overcooked potatoes fall apart when halved and dipped.
- Butter quantityUnspecified, as often in recipes of this kind. A teaspoon dotted on each of the twelve halves comes to about 4 tablespoons total.
- PepperBlack pepper on candied sweet potatoes reads oddly now, but salt and pepper turn up in a number of American recipes of this type. It cuts the sugar; leave it in before deciding against it.
- Dish and yieldTwelve halves need a shallow baking dish large enough to hold them in one layer, cut side up, so the syrup caramelizes rather than pools. Serves six as a side.
- BastingSpoon over any syrup left in the pan halfway through. The original assumes the dip alone suffices, but a second coat gives the lacquered finish the name promises.
Candied and glazed sweet potatoes appear in American cookbooks through the second half of the nineteenth century and are often said to have settled into place as a holiday side well before marshmallows entered the picture in the 1910s and 20s. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company as part of its broad domestic-advice list, was aimed at households cooking from a standard repertoire rather than an ambitious one, and the recipe reflects that: six potatoes, sugar, water, butter, and no fuss. The brown sugar matters to the period taste, being less refined and more molasses-heavy than most brown sugar sold today; a dark brown sugar comes closer to what the original cook would have reached for.