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Sweet Potatoes En Brochette
Pare the potatoes and cut into one-half-inch slices, making them as uniform in shape as possible. Arrange on skewers in groups of four, place in boiling water and parboil for ten minutes. Drain, brush over with melted butter, sprinkle with brown sugar and bake in dripping-pan until brown.
A simple treatment that survives well: parboiled sweet potato rounds, threaded on skewers, glazed with butter and brown sugar and finished in the oven. The original gives no temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- En brochetteSimply "on a skewer." Skewers in kitchens of this period were generally metal, which go from boiling water to oven without trouble. Bamboo or wooden skewers scorch at the exposed ends; soak them first or trim them short.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to bake until brown. A hot oven, in the region of 400 to 425F, should brown the sugar in roughly 20 to 25 minutes without stewing the slices soft.
- The parboil is the hingeTen minutes in boiling water should leave the slices yielding at the edge but still firm at the center. Undercook them and they stay chalky in the oven, because the sugar crust browns long before the interior finishes; overcook them and they slide off the skewer.
- Uniform slicesThe instruction to make them "as uniform in shape as possible" is doing real work. Use the straight middle section of the potato so the half-inch rounds are the same diameter and cook at the same rate; save the tapering ends for something else.
- Dripping-panThe shallow pan that sat under a roast to catch fat. Any rimmed sheet pan does, and a light film of butter or a sheet of parchment keeps the sugar from welding the slices to the metal.
- Sugar and butterBrush the butter on while the slices are still hot and steaming so it clings, then sprinkle the sugar. Turn the skewers once during baking if you want both faces glazed.
- YieldTwo medium sweet potatoes yield roughly six skewers of four slices, which serves three or four as a side. Figure one large potato per two people.
Sweet potatoes were long established on the American table before this book appeared, and cookbooks of the period increasingly treated them as a sweet-leaning vegetable to be candied, glazed or baked with sugar rather than simply boiled. The en brochette framing fits a broader fashion in turn-of-the-century American cookery for French service terms applied to homely ingredients: the Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a middle-class domestic audience, carries a number of these small gestures toward refinement, which let a cook put an ordinary root vegetable on the table under a name that suggested the restaurant. Skewer cookery would also have been practical in a coal-range kitchen, where a group of items on a metal skewer could be lifted, turned and served together without handling each piece.