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Sweet Potatoes Sautees
Boil four good-sized sweet potatoes in two quarts water and half teaspoon salt for forty minutes, drain, peel, then finely slice. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the potatoes, season with a saltspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, and fry over a brisk fire for ten minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile, giving them a nice omelette form, then let them brown for five minutes, turn on a hot dish, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A French sauté technique applied to an American vegetable: the potatoes are boiled whole the day of, sliced, then pressed into a cake in the pan. The hinge is letting the slices sit still long enough at the end to form a crust.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning here is about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper for four potatoes, which is a genuinely peppery dish, as intended.
- Boiling timeForty minutes suits large potatoes started in cold water; medium ones are usually tender in 25 to 35. Test with a skewer and pull them while they still hold their shape, since slices from an over-soft potato will collapse in the pan.
- Cool before slicingHot boiled sweet potato tears apart under a knife. Let them cool until they can be handled comfortably, peel, then slice; the recipe asks for 'finely' sliced, so a quarter inch or thinner.
- Brisk fireMedium-high heat on a modern burner. Use a heavy skillet or cast iron; sweet potato sugars catch quickly on thin pans.
- Butter quantityA tablespoon and a half is scant for four potatoes in any pan wider than 8 inches. Add butter as needed, or start with a spoonful of neutral oil and finish with butter so the milk solids do not blacken during the long browning.
- "A nice omelette form"Toss for the first ten minutes, then stop stirring, gather the slices into a cake with the back of a spoon and leave it alone for the final five minutes so the underside crusts. Whether the shape intended is a flat round or the oval fold of an omelette is not spelled out; either way it goes onto the dish browned side up.
- YieldFour potatoes serve four as a side dish. Best straight from the pan, as the crust softens within minutes of sitting.
This is a French treatment of an American vegetable, which is much of what makes it typical of The International Cook Book (1906), compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York. The sequence — boil, cool, slice, sauté in butter over a brisk fire, form into a cake, finish with chopped parsley — follows familiar French method for potatoes, and the instruction to give them "a nice omelette form" reads as kitchen shorthand for shaping the slices in the pan. Sweet potatoes had long been common in the American South and in Northern winter markets by then, most often baked, boiled or candied with sugar and molasses; treating them as a savory sautéed potato, seasoned heavily with black pepper and no sugar at all, fits a period when hotel chefs were fitting native American ingredients into the classical repertoire in which they had been trained.