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Browned Sweet Potatoes
Cut any cold sweet potatoes into slices lengthwise.
Season with a little salt, dip in melted butter, roll lightly in sugar, and brown in oven.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already have boiled or baked sweet potatoes in the cold pantry. The only real variable is heat: sugar on the surface is what browns, and it will burn before the potato colours if the oven is too hot.
- Oven heat"Brown in oven" gives no temperature. A moderately hot oven, in the region of 400F, will do the job in ten to fifteen minutes on a buttered sheet, turned once; hotter than that and the sugar scorches while the interior is still cool.
- Cut thicknessLengthwise slices about half an inch thick hold together when turned. Thin slices dry out into chips before they brown evenly.
- Butter quantityNo amount is given. Roughly 2 tablespoons melted butter and 2 tablespoons sugar coat two medium cold potatoes; brush rather than dip if you want them less rich.
- Sugar choiceThe recipe says only "sugar", which most likely means plain granulated. Light brown sugar browns faster and reads closer to the glazed sweet potatoes of the period, but needs watching.
- Starting pointCold boiled potatoes are wetter than cold baked ones and will steam rather than brown. Pat the slices dry before buttering.
- YieldTwo cold sweet potatoes will make a side dish for three or four.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to leftovers were a small industry in the United States between about 1890 and 1920, when household economy was treated as a technical skill. Sweet potatoes were a staple of that thrift: cheap, filling, and abundant in autumn, they were commonly boiled or baked in quantity and reworked over several days. The butter-and-sugar treatment here is the plainest form of a family of American glazed sweet potato dishes that also produced candied sweet potatoes and, later, the marshmallow-topped casserole. What the recipe assumes and never says is that many cooks would have had an oven already hot from other work, so browning a pan of slices cost nothing extra.