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Sweet Potato with Pineapple
6 small sweet potatoes
⅓ cup honey
⅓ as much pineapple as potato ¼ cup water Boil the potatoes with the skins on. When cool, peel and cut them in pieces one-quarter of an inch thick. Mix honey and hot water. Just cover the bottom of a baking-dish with the mixture, add a layer of sweet potatoes with sliced pineapple. Pour the remaining honey mixture over them and bake for ten minutes in the oven.
A simple glazed sweet potato dish whose only real vagueness is the oven, which the original never specifies. Everything else is straightforward once the proportions are pinned down.
- The ovenNo temperature is given. A fairly hot oven, around 400F, will reduce the honey syrup so it catches at the edges rather than just warming through.
- Ten minutes is not enoughThe potatoes are already fully cooked, so nothing needs to soften, but ten minutes will not glaze anything. Give it 25 to 30 minutes, spooning the syrup back over the top once or twice, until the liquid is thick and sticky.
- Boil them whole and unpeeledThis is the hinge of the recipe. Skin-on boiling keeps the flesh from waterlogging, and cooling before peeling is what lets you cut clean quarter-inch slices instead of mash.
- "⅓ as much pineapple as potato""⅓ as much pineapple as potato" -- read as prepared fruit against prepared potato. Six small sweet potatoes come to roughly 2 lb, so scale the pineapple to about a third of that by eye rather than to a fixed can size.
- Pineapple, fresh or cannedCanned pineapple in syrup was the likelier option for most readers of the period. Canned rings, drained and quartered, behave as intended; fresh pineapple is sharper and wetter, so cut the added water back if you use it.
- Honey and waterA third cup of honey with a quarter cup of hot water gives a thin syrup that thickens in the oven. Warm the water before mixing or the honey will not dissolve evenly.
- YieldServes four to six as a side. It reheats well, covered.
Sweet potatoes baked with sugar and fruit belong to a long American tradition of treating the vegetable almost as a dessert, and by the 1920s canned pineapple had become cheap and ubiquitous enough to turn up in savory dishes across the country -- large-scale Hawaiian canning had made the fruit a pantry staple rather than a luxury. The use of honey rather than sugar or molasses is worth noting: American home cooks had been urged toward honey, corn syrup and other sweeteners during the First World War sugar shortages, and recipes written in that habit persisted into the following decade. Butterick, a pattern company that published cookery and household advice alongside its sewing patterns, aimed squarely at that reader -- a home cook working from a stocked pantry.