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January 15
Menu: Pickled Beets; Vegetable Soup; Celery; Olives; Sauted Chicken, Brown Gravy; Candied Sweet Potatoes; Lettuce and Green Pepper Salad; Plum Pudding, Hard Sauce; Coffee Candied Sweet Potatoes-12 sweet potatoes, 1 cup boiling water, brown sugar, 1/4 cup Crisco, salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon. Pare and parboil potatoes, cut in halves, boil 10 minutes, drain, lay in greased baking dish. Spread with Crisco, sprinkle with brown sugar, salt, pepper, and powdered cinnamon, pour in boiling water and cook until tender. Baste often with sauce in pan while cooking. The cinnamon may be omitted.
A straightforward baked sweet potato dish from a promotional cookbook, written in the compressed style of a menu-book appendix. The gaps are all in the oven instructions, which the original assumes you can supply.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe never names one. A moderate oven, around 350-375F, suits the dish here; the potatoes are already parboiled and only need to finish through and glaze.
- TimingExpect 30 to 45 minutes uncovered, basting every 10 minutes or so. The syrup should reduce to a glaze; if it dries out before the potatoes are tender, add a few tablespoons of water rather than more sugar.
- The parboiling"Pare and parboil... cut in halves, boil 10 minutes" reads as one operation described twice. Treat it as a single boil of about 10 minutes after halving, until a knife enters the outside but the centre still resists. Fully soft potatoes will collapse in the pan.
- Brown sugar, unmeasuredThe original lists it without quantity. For 12 potatoes, roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of light brown sugar gives a proper glaze; more than that and the pan liquid turns to candy before the potatoes are done.
- CriscoThen a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, now a soybean and palm blend. Any solid shortening works, and butter is better here for flavour since nothing about the dish needs a neutral fat.
- The pepperNot a misprint; it is in the ingredient list and repeated in the method. Salt and pepper alongside the sugar turn up in a number of period sweet potato recipes, and a light grinding of black pepper cuts the sugar. Use it before deciding it belongs to another recipe.
- Vessel and yieldTwelve potatoes halved need a large shallow roasting pan, not a deep casserole; crowding steams them instead of glazing them. This serves ten or more as a side dish. Halve it freely.
- Boiling waterPour the cup of water into the pan around the potatoes, not over the sugared tops, or you rinse the seasoning off before it has a chance to set.
Crisco -- hydrogenated cottonseed oil, solid at room temperature, neither butter nor lard -- was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, and the company published cookbooks to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens; Marion Harris Neil compiled The Story of Crisco (1913) for them, and also a Crisco menu book, A Calendar of Dinners, which gave a menu for every day of the year. That calendar format would explain why this recipe sits under a heading about coffee, carries a date, and trails off into the next day's lettuce cocktail: the recipes were printed to support the menus rather than to stand alone. Candied sweet potatoes themselves long predate Crisco; they are generally traced to the American South, where sweet potatoes were a staple field crop and cheap molasses or brown sugar turned them into something closer to a confection. The savoury seasoning here, salt and pepper alongside the sugar, is worth noting against the later marshmallow-topped version.