Home › A Calendar of Dinners › December 7
December 7
Menu: Stewed Chicken, Cream Dressing; Baked Sweet Potatoes; Creamed Carrots; Onion Salad; Indian Pudding; Bon Bons; Coffee Baked Sweet Potatoes-Peel boiled sweet potatoes and cut in slices crosswise. To 2 cups of slices allow 3 tablespoons Crisco, and 2 tablespoons each of sugar and vinegar. Have Crisco hot, lay potatoes in it, sprinkle sugar over top, and pour vinegar over lightly. Bake until a golden brown.
A sweet-sour glazed sweet potato, boiled first and finished in fat with sugar and vinegar. The original gives no temperature and no timing, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Use 400F, which browns the sugar without stewing the slices; expect 25 to 35 minutes, turning once so both cut faces glaze.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, the product this book was written to sell. Butter or a neutral oil works in the same quantity, and butter browns the sugar better.
- "Have Crisco hot"This is the hinge. Melt the fat in the baking dish in the oven until it shimmers before the potatoes go in, or the slices absorb cold fat and turn greasy rather than crisping at the edges.
- Boil the potatoes shortThey are cooked twice. Boil only until a knife meets slight resistance, about 15 minutes for medium potatoes, then cool before peeling and slicing; fully soft potatoes collapse into mash in the pan.
- Slice thicknessNot stated. About half an inch holds its shape and still glazes through.
- The vinegarCider vinegar suits the dish; 2 tablespoons against 2 of sugar makes it pointedly sour, closer to a pickled relish than a candied yam. Cut the vinegar to a tablespoon if you want it nearer the sweet side.
- YieldTwo cups of slices is perhaps two medium sweet potatoes, enough for two or three alongside a roast.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with a wholly new ingredient: a solid, shelf-stable shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911 as a substitute for both lard and butter. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a menu to every day of the year. The dish itself belongs to a large American family of sweet potatoes finished with sugar and an acid, and the vinegar here does the work that orange juice or pineapple does in later versions, keeping the sugar from reading as merely candy. Sweet potatoes were cheap and stored well through winter.