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Sweet Potato Puree
Boil six medium, sweet potatoes for forty minutes in two quarts water with a teaspoon salt; drain, peel and press through a sieve into a small pan. Season with a saltspoon salt two saltspoons white pepper; add half ounce of butter and one and a half gills hot milk. Mix well with a wooden spoon while heating for two minutes and serve as required.
A plain French-style puree of sweet potatoes, written in the measures of a professional kitchen around 1900. Nothing here is difficult; the only translations needed are the units.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of hot milk is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the seasoning 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon white pepper — assertive by modern taste, so add the pepper in stages.
- Half an ounce of butterThat is one tablespoon. For six potatoes it is a restrained amount; the puree is meant to taste of the vegetable rather than of cream, though doubling it does no harm.
- Boiling timeForty minutes is a long boil even for whole potatoes in their skins. Test with a knife tip at 25 minutes — modern sweet potatoes vary widely in size, and overboiled ones absorb water and give a slack puree.
- Skins on, then offBoiling unpeeled and slipping the skins afterward keeps the flesh from waterlogging. The skins come away easily while the potatoes are still hot, so work quickly with a cloth to hold them.
- Sieve or ricerPressing through a sieve gives the smooth, lump-free texture the recipe is after. A potato ricer or food mill does the same job faster. Do not use a food processor, which turns starchy potato gluey.
- The two-minute reheatThe final heating brings the butter and hot milk into the puree and returns it to serving temperature. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; sweet potato puree catches on the pan bottom readily.
- YieldSix medium potatoes give roughly six side-dish servings. The puree holds well over a pan of hot water for half an hour if the surface is covered.
Sweet potatoes reached European kitchens from the Americas earlier than the ordinary potato and were long treated as a sweet-ish luxury vegetable; by the time this book was compiled they were common in American cookery, and vegetable purees of this kind were a fixture of professional practice alongside roast meat and game. The method here is straight professional practice: boil, pass through a sieve, correct with butter and hot milk, reheat briefly. White pepper rather than black is conventional in this tradition — the point was to season without flecking a pale dish.