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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
Boil the potatoes without peeling them, and when tender drain and strip off the skins. Cut each potato in half, if large, lay in a granite baking-pan and add to each piece a seasoning of salt, pepper, a dot of butter and a sprinkling of sugar. Bake twenty minutes in a quick oven, when the potatoes should be quite brown.
A straightforward candied sweet potato, roasted rather than stewed in syrup. Two details in the original need translating: the pan and the oven.
- "Quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. At that heat the sugar and butter caramelize on the cut faces within the stated twenty minutes; a moderate oven is unlikely to brown them in the time given.
- Granite baking-panGranite ware is speckled enamel over steel, not stone. Any shallow metal roasting pan works; a heavy sheet pan browns the cut sides best. Avoid glass, which heats too slowly for this.
- Cut side down, then upThe recipe does not say which way up the halves lie, and seasoning each piece before baking suggests cut side up. For more colour on the cut face, the halves can be laid cut side down at first and turned up later, with the pan butter spooned over.
- Boiling firstBoil in the skins until a knife slides in easily, roughly 25-35 minutes depending on size, then cool a few minutes before peeling — the skins slip off in sheets while warm and tear when cold.
- SugarThe recipe specifies only 'a sprinkling' and does not say what kind; granulated white is the likely default. Brown sugar or maple syrup darkens faster, so check at fifteen minutes if you substitute.
- Sweet potato vs. yamEither the moist orange sort, sold in many American markets as 'yam', or the drier pale-fleshed sort works, but the pale ones take longer to brown.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Figure one medium potato per person, six potatoes filling a standard 9x13 pan in a single layer — crowding steams them and prevents browning.
Sweet potatoes were a staple of the American South long before they were a holiday side dish, and candying them — with sugar, butter and sometimes molasses — appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks well before the marshmallow topping that later took over the genre. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued this book as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the middle-class housekeeper, which explains its brisk, unfussy tone and its assumption that the reader owns granite ware, the cheap enameled steel then in wide use for baking pans. The recipe is notable for what it leaves out: no syrup, no basting schedule, no marshmallows, just heat, fat and sugar doing the work.