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September 19
Menu: Vegetable Soup; Roast Spare Ribs, Apple Sauce; Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style; Orange Custard; Coffee Sweet Potatoes, Southern Style-Bake sweet potatoes until thoroughly done. Remove from oven and cut in halves lengthwise; remove potato from skins carefully, so as to keep skins in condition to refill. Mash potato, adding sufficient melted Crisco and cream to moisten. The potato mixture should be of the consistency of mashed potato when put back in shells. Season with salt, pepper, and very little sherry. Refill skins, brush tops with Crisco and brown 5 minutes in hot oven.
A stuffed baked sweet potato, written for a shortening advertisement but sound as method. The whole thing hinges on baking the potatoes long enough that the flesh scoops away cleanly while the skins stay firm enough to hold a filling.
- CriscoThe book is a promotional cookbook for Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched in 1911, and nearly all of its recipes call for Crisco whether or not they need it. Here melted butter is the obvious substitute and most cooks will prefer its flavor; a neutral oil works if you want the dish dairy-free, though the cream would then need replacing too.
- "Bake until thoroughly done"Figure 400F for 45 to 60 minutes for medium potatoes, until a knife slides in with no resistance. Underbaked flesh will not mash smooth and the skins tear when you scoop.
- "Hot oven"Period usage generally means somewhere in the region of 400 to 450F. Five minutes at that heat will set and lightly color the tops; a broiler for two or three minutes does the same job faster if the potatoes have cooled while you filled them.
- Scooping the shellsLeave a thin layer of flesh clinging to the skin rather than scraping bare. A cleanly stripped skin collapses under the filling.
- Cream and consistencySweet potato varieties vary enormously in moisture, so add cream a spoonful at a time. The target stated in the recipe is right: it should mound and hold its shape, not slump.
- The sherry"Very little" is left to judgment; a teaspoon or so is enough for a few potatoes. It is there as a seasoning rather than a flavor of its own, and some of the alcohol will cook off in the second bake. Omitting it costs the dish very little.
- Yield and timingThe recipe gives no quantities; allow about one potato per person, or a half as a smaller side. Both the baking and the filling can be done hours ahead and the final browning left until service.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was one of the more successful pieces of branded cookbook publishing in America: several hundred recipes, all of them calling for the company's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, wrapped around a sales argument about cleanliness and digestibility. The "Calendar of Dinners" section assigned a menu to every day of the year, which is why this potato dish carries the date September 20; it happens to sit under a heading about coffee. Twice-baked sweet potatoes described as "Southern style" are often said to have been common in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, reflecting both the crop's association with the South and the era's fondness for food returned to its own shell — an approach applied equally to potatoes, oysters, crab and eggs.