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Sweet Potatoes
Wash clean and bake in a hot oven one hour; or place in steamer over a kettle of boiling water from half to three-quarters of an hour, or when almost done, take off, scrape or peel them, place in a dripping-pan, and bake half an hour; or cut in slices and fry in butter or lard; or peel and slice when raw, and fry, a layer at a time, on griddle, or in a frying-pan, with a little melted lard, being careful not to cook too long, or they will become too hard; or drop in boiling lard in frying-pan, turning till a nice brown on both sides; or halve or quarter, and bake in pan with roast beef, basting them often with the drippings.
A catalogue of every way a nineteenth-century Southern kitchen handled sweet potatoes rather than a single recipe. The methods still work; only the vocabulary and a few timings need attention.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat a medium sweet potato takes 45-60 minutes, and the hour given is about right for large ones. The potato is done when a knife meets no resistance at the thickest point and syrup has begun to weep from the skin onto the pan.
- Line the panBaked sweet potatoes leak caramelised sugar that welds itself to metal. Foil or parchment saves a long scrub.
- Dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan set under or beside meat to catch fat. Any low-sided sheet pan or roasting tin serves.
- Steaming, then bakingThe two-stage method — steam 30-45 minutes, peel, then bake half an hour — is the best of the lot. Par-cooking converts starch to sugar and the dry heat afterwards concentrates it. Do not skip the peeling step; skin left on after steaming turns slippery and leathery.
- Lard and butterLard is still sold and gives the cleanest fry, but any neutral oil with a decent smoke point works. Butter alone will brown before thick slices cook through, so keep the slices under a quarter inch or cut the butter with oil.
- The frying warning"Careful not to cook too long, or they will become too hard" is the hinge of the whole entry. Sweet potato has far more sugar than white potato and can turn from browned to scorched and hard quickly. Medium heat, and pull them the moment the edges set.
- Roasting with beefThe recipe gives no time or temperature for this method; alongside a joint at ordinary roasting heat, halved or quartered pieces basted in the drippings will want roughly three-quarters of an hour. Turn them once so the cut faces sit in the fat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; figure about one medium potato per person as a side dish.
The Dixie Cook Book treats the sweet potato the way a modern book treats the onion — an assumed daily staple needing no introduction, only a list of the household's usual handlings. Sweet potatoes are a New World crop, grown across the American South since the colonial period and central to the region's cooking well before the Civil War because they yielded heavily on poor ground and stored through the winter in a straw-lined pit or a dry cellar. The confusion with the true yam, an unrelated African tuber, is generally traced to enslaved cooks applying a familiar word to an unfamiliar root; supermarkets in the United States still label soft orange sweet potatoes "yams" as a result. Note that nothing here is sweetened. The marshmallow-topped casserole belongs to the twentieth century and to marshmallow manufacturers' advertising; in 1883 the potato was expected to supply its own sugar.