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Glazed Sweet Potatoes
6 medium sized sweet potatoes cup brown sugar 1 tablespoon butter Wash and pare the potatoes. Cook 10 minutes in boiling salt water. Drain, cut in halves lengthwise, and put in a buttered pan. Sprinkle with sugar; add butter melted. Bake in slow oven 325°F. about one hour.
A straightforward parboil-and-bake method that predates the marshmallow era of candied sweet potatoes. Two details in the printed text need attention before you start.
- The missing sugar amountThe ingredient line reads "cup brown sugar"; a fraction appears to have dropped out in printing. For six medium potatoes, something in the region of 1/4 to 1/2 cup suits the dish, the smaller measure giving a lighter glaze.
- One tablespoon of butter is not muchSpread over six halved potatoes it will barely coat them. Three to four tablespoons, melted and poured over, produces a glaze rather than a dry sugar crust.
- The parboil is the hingeTen minutes in boiling salted water is meant to set the outside and season the flesh, not to cook the potato through. Test with a knife tip: it should still meet real resistance. Overcooked here, the halves collapse when you cut and turn them.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives 325F outright and needs no translation. An hour at that heat is right for halves of a medium potato — long enough for the sugar and butter to reduce to syrup without scorching.
- BastingNot mentioned, but worth doing. Spoon the pan syrup back over the potatoes two or three times during the hour, or the exposed cut surfaces dry out while the syrup pools underneath.
- Pan sizeUse a dish that holds the twelve halves in a single layer with the cut sides up. Crowded, they steam; too large a pan and the small quantity of syrup spreads thin and burns.
- Sweet potato, not yamAmerican "yams" at the supermarket are orange-fleshed sweet potatoes and are what this recipe wants. Paler, drier-fleshed varieties work but need the larger measure of butter.
- YieldSix potatoes, halved, serve six as a side dish alongside ham, pork or roast poultry.
Sweet potatoes baked with sugar and butter appear in American cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century under names like candied, glazed and Southern sweet potatoes, and the method here — parboil, halve, sugar, slow bake — is the plain older form, before the marshmallow topping became a fixture of the holiday table in the twentieth century. Sweet potatoes were inexpensive, kept well in a cool cellar through the winter, and were promoted in the period as a wholesome starch.