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Sweet Potatoes in Cream
Peel, wash and drain five medium, sweet potatoes; place in a saucepan with a quart water and half teaspoon salt, cover the pan and boil for forty minutes, drain, cut into quarter-inch squares; place in a frying pan, add half ounce good butter, one gill milk, half gill cream, two saltspoons pepper, a saltspoon each salt and grated nutmeg; lightly mix and cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Remove, dress on a deep dish and serve.
A plain creamed side dish that depends entirely on not overcooking the potatoes before they ever reach the cream. The measurements are the fussy pre-metric American set found throughout Filippini's books.
- The hinge: boil lessForty minutes in a quart of water will reduce most sweet potatoes to mush, and they will fall apart when you try to cut them into cubes. Boil whole peeled potatoes 20-25 minutes, until a knife meets slight resistance, then drain and cool a few minutes before dicing so the cubes hold their shape through the second cooking.
- Gill and half gillA gill is half a cup, so one gill milk is 4 fl oz and half a gill cream is 2 fl oz. Together that is 6 fl oz of liquid for five potatoes, enough to coat rather than submerge.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct against the sweetness; the salt and nutmeg are a quarter teaspoon each.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. The dish is dressed rather than enriched, and the cream does most of the work.
- DicingQuarter-inch cubes are small; half-inch survives the pan better and still cooks through in ten minutes. Cut with a thin knife and do not stir hard, or the edges will break down into a puree.
- The ten minutes in the panThis is for reducing the milk and cream to a clinging sauce, not for cooking the potato further. Keep the heat moderate and fold rather than stir; if the pan goes dry before the time is up, the liquid has reduced too far and a spoonful more cream will bring it back.
- YieldFive medium sweet potatoes serve four to six as a side. "Dress on a deep dish" means turn it into a warmed serving bowl deep enough to hold the sauce.
Alexander Filippini cooked at Delmonico's in New York and wrote for a readership that expected a French kitchen vocabulary applied to whatever ingredients America supplied -- hence an American root vegetable handled with milk, cream, butter and nutmeg much as a French cook would treat potatoes a la creme. Nutmeg with sweet potatoes appears in nineteenth-century American cookery and points back to the same spice-and-cream tradition that produced the sweeter, later casseroles.