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Escalloped Sweet Potatoes
Twelve cold boiled sweet potatoes; one-third cup of butter; one-fourth cup of boiling water; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper and three teaspoons of sugar. Slice the potato, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Butter a large shallow dish and spread the potato in it, making a layer not more than an inch thick. Melt the butter in the water, and add the sugar. Sprinkle one-fourth of this liquid over the potato, and set the latter in a hot oven. In ten minutes sprinkle another one-fourth of the liquid over the potatoes, and repeat this twice more at intervals of ten minutes. After the last sprinkling, bake ten minutes (making forty in all), and serve hot.
A basting dish rather than a true scallop: there is no cream and no crumb topping, just butter-sugar liquid applied in four rounds so the slices glaze rather than steam. The schedule is the whole technique.
- The hinge is the four sprinklingsAdding all the butter liquid at once floods the dish and the potatoes stew in it. Divided into four applications ten minutes apart, each one is absorbed and reduced, and the surfaces caramelize between rounds.
- "A hot oven"Period usage puts this somewhere around 400 to 450F. At that heat the forty minutes given will brown the top slices; at 350F you get soft, pale potatoes and the timing means nothing.
- Twelve potatoes is a crowdTwelve medium sweet potatoes is 4 to 5 lb, serving ten to twelve. Halve everything for a household of four and use a dish that holds the slices no more than an inch deep, as instructed.
- Cold boiled potatoesThe recipe starts from already-boiled sweet potatoes, cooled. Boil whole in their skins, cool completely, then peel and slice; warm potatoes crumble under the knife.
- Shallow, not deepAn inch-deep layer in a wide dish gives the surface area the basting needs. A deep casserole traps steam and the sugar never sets into a glaze.
- Sugar quantityThree teaspoons across 4 to 5 lb of potato is seasoning, not candying. Sweet potato varieties vary widely in sweetness, and some modern ones may be sweeter than what was to hand, so taste before adding more.
- Butter and waterOne-third cup butter melted into one-fourth cup boiling water makes a bit under two-thirds of a cup of liquid, so roughly 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons per round. Keep it warm and stir before each sprinkling so the butter and water go on together.
"Escalloped" in American cookbooks of this period is often said to have meant simply baked in a shallow dish, usually in layers, and only sometimes with the crumbs and cream the word now suggests. This version belongs to a practical tradition of using up cold boiled vegetables, a constant preoccupation in households that boiled potatoes by the potful. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book in 1911 for the same middle-class readership. Sweet potatoes were an everyday staple in the American South and a familiar autumn and winter vegetable further north, generally treated with butter and a little sugar rather than the marshmallow topping that arrived in the twentieth century.