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Roasted Sweet Potatoes
After washing them thoroughly cut off both ends, pare them into olive-shaped pieces, put a lump of butter in a bakingpan and put the potatoes in with it and roast in a moderate oven for about half an hour. Serve on a folded napkin.
A hotel side dish reduced to its essentials: pared sweet potatoes, butter, a moderate oven. The only real technique is the shaping, and the only real risk is uneven cooking.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven in this period is usually reckoned at roughly 350-375F. At that heat the pieces are worth turning once or twice so the butter coats all sides.
- "Olive-shaped"This is turned work, the same family as tourne: each piece pared to a small tapered barrel, though an olive shape is generally smaller than the standard two-inch tourne. The point is that every piece is identical and so cooks in the same time; if you skip it, cut even 1½-inch chunks instead.
- Butter quantity"A lump" is undefined. For two pounds of pared potato, 3 to 4 tablespoons is enough to gloss them without pooling.
- WasteTurning sweet potatoes discards a great deal, commonly somewhere between a third and a half of their weight. Buy well over what you intend to serve and keep the trim for soup or mash.
- TimingHalf an hour suits pieces of this size in a single uncrowded layer. Crowd the pan and they steam rather than roast; test with a knife tip, which should meet no resistance.
- SeasoningThe recipe names none. Salt before they go in the oven.
- The folded napkinA starched napkin folded on the platter absorbed steam and butter so the potatoes did not sit in a puddle. A warmed dish with the pieces drained briefly does the same job.
- YieldRoughly four servings from two pounds of raw sweet potatoes after trimming.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 Cook Book is often said to draw on the working repertoire of the Waldorf, though much of it appears to be compiled from other sources, and this entry shows how much of that repertoire was French method applied to American produce. The sweet potato is a New World crop, long a staple of the Southern table and usually treated there with sugar, syrup or bourbon; here it is pared into pommes tournées, roasted in butter and sent out on a folded napkin like any classic garnish potato. The napkin service — sur serviette — was standard for fried and roasted potatoes in nineteenth-century restaurant dining and marks the dish as belonging to the hotel dining room rather than the home kitchen.