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Baked Sweet Potatoes
Baked sweet potatoes in the halfshell. Select shapely sweet potatoes of even size, wash and scrub with care. Bake and cut in halves lengthwise. Remove the pulp from the skins and pass it through a ricer. Season with salt, butter and cream. Beat until smooth, then refill the skins with the mixture. Reheat before serving. If desired dust the tops with powdered sugar.
A twice-baked sweet potato with no numbers attached; the technique is sound and only needs quantities and temperatures supplied.
- Oven heatThe book assumes you know how to bake a potato. Use 400-425F for 45-60 minutes, until the skins give easily under a thumb. Set them on a sheet pan; sweet potatoes weep sugary syrup as they cook.
- Bake them dryDo not wrap in foil and do not oil the skins. The shells have to hold their shape after scooping, and a steamed skin tears. Scrubbed and bare is what the original intends.
- Scoop while hotHalve and empty them as soon as they can be handled. Cooled sweet potato pulp turns gluey and passes through a ricer badly.
- Seasoning amountsNone are given. For four medium potatoes, start with 2 tablespoons butter, 3-4 tablespoons cream and a scant teaspoon salt, adjusting to taste. The mixture should be soft enough to pipe but not slack.
- The ricerA potato ricer or food mill gives the fluffy texture wanted here. A food processor tends to work the pulp into something denser and stickier, so the ricer the recipe names is the safer route.
- Leave a wallLeaving a little pulp against the skin helps the shell hold its shape; scraped completely bare, the halves are floppy and awkward to refill.
- ReheatingFifteen to twenty minutes at 400F browns the tops and heats through. If you have added the powdered sugar, watch it -- the sugar will scorch before the filling is hot if the oven runs high.
- Yield and placementYield -- Two halves per person as a side dish.
Sweet potatoes appear all through American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the practice of baking, mashing and returning the pulp to its own skin parallels the dish served as potatoes in the half shell, a phrase that echoes the language of oysters. The sugar dusting is a reminder that in this era the sweet potato sat ambiguously between vegetable and dessert; the same books that serve it with roast meat also candy it, glaze it with molasses and bake it into pies. The ricer called for was a common piece of kitchen equipment by then, valued because it produced a light mash without the gumminess heavy beating would cause.