Candied Sweet Potatoes: or, Sweet potato casserole without a potato masher

A quick note before we get to the sweet potatoes: Millions of people in the US are losing food benefits. In fact, the Supreme Court just granted Trump's appeal to avoid paying food benefits, thus legally clearing the way for people to starve. 

If you are considering buying groceries to drop off at your local food bank, think about donating money directly to them instead. Food banks often buy food at bulk rates, so your money will feed more people than if you did the shopping yourself. And of course, the people in charge of food banks have a firsthand view of what foods are needed.

Right, on with the potatoes...

Someone accidentally volunteered for my great-grandmothers recipes.

Candied Sweet Potatoes 6 uniform-sized sweet potatoes ¼ cup water ½ cup sugar (brown, white, or maple) 3 tbsp butter ¼ tsp salt (only add this if butter is unsalted) Cinnamon to taste Heat oven to 350°. Grease a large roasting pan (or a smaller one if you're cooking fewer potatoes.) Boil or microwave the potatoes until they're somewhere between a quarter done and halfway done. Then peel them and cut into whatever size you like. Place in the baking dish. While the potatoes are cooking, bring the sugar and water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and boil for 4 minutes. Turn off the heat, add the butter, salt, (and cinnamon, if desired), and stir until all is melted and mixed. Pour the syrup over the potatoes in the baking dish, then stir to coat. Bake until the potatoes are thoroughly cooked, stirring and basting every 5 to 10 minutes. Be sure to scoop the syrup up from the bottom of the pan every time you stir them, so it coats all the potatoes on its way back down. If desired, you can use orange juice instead of all or part of the water when making the syrup. Note: Don't decrease the amount of syrup, even if you are cooking fewer potatoes. Source: Handwritten recipe, probably 1920s-1930s Notebook of Hanora Frances "Hannah" Dannehy O'Neil

For the past few weeks, I've been getting asked to make "candied sweet potatoes," which I have never made before. We do have a recipe from Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger. Unfortunately, I have no idea what she means by "one cup sirup." Am I supposed to boil my own simple syrup? Dump in corn syrup? Use molasses?

Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger; April 23, 1919; p. 12

Long after I set that recipe aside for lack of details, what should turn up in my great-grandmother's recipe book but... candied sweet potatoes!

First off, I love that her penmanship looks like it came right out of the handwriting textbook. Second, this reads like it was copied word-for-word out of a published cookbook. Or perhaps she really sounded like that when she was writing out recipes. 

Unfortunately, I couldn't get past the first word without a dictionary. I have never "parboiled" anything in my life. Fortunately, she says to parboil them for "about ten minutes," and setting a timer is one of my many cooking skills. 

Now we can all learn together!

 

Actually, let's pause for a minute. The recipe says to use "six uniform-sized sweet potatoes." I used the big pot that normally only comes out for spaghetti night. Two potatoes had a bit of extra room to roll around, three of them would have fit just fine, but six would be impossible.

This is a good time to mention that my great-grandmother only had two children. Who the heck was she cooking this many potatoes for? Was she following the time-honored strategy of silencing her husband with carbs? Did she often make when the extended family got together? Did she copy this verbatim from a book and then always cut everything in half? Short of finding a detailed diary to go with the book, we'll never know.

While our potatoes were parboiling, we had another pot with syrup in it. The recipe says to use "granulated, brown or maple" sugar. Maple sugar sounded amazing, but I don't think a single store in the county sells it. Perhaps if I go back up to Canada I will bring this recipe with me. But we used brown sugar instead. 

After parboiling for ten minutes (that's 6 hectoseconds for our metric friends), the potatoes were slightly soft and spongy, like they had sat on the back of the shelf just a little bit too long. I figured that even if I don't know what parboiling is, the timer didn't lie.

I will say that parboiling the potatoes made them a lot easier to peel. Granted, we could have microwaved them until fully cooked and then picked off the skins with our fingers. But the knife slid right through these. I didn't have to use any force at all.

And now we get to the part where the candy meets the spud. We are told to put the potatoes in an "agate or glass dripping pan." I guess "agate" was another term for "granite ware"-- those thin metal pans with speckled enamel. I don't have one of those, so we put the potatoes into the extra-deep casserole and found that things would go a lot better if we cut them smaller.

I initially hesitated to return the potatoes to the cutting board because I really wanted to make this recipe work as written. When I make older recipes, I try to stick to the directions because-- well-- in theory someone got them to work. But we don't have a big roasting pan to make room for full-size spuds. Also, I didn't want to serve or eat massive, sticky potatoes that required a knife and fork.

These spuds might be bigger than the recipe intends anyway. When I put them on the counter, someone gawked for a second and said "Those are some big potatoes!" I don't know where to start looking for produce sizes of yore, but this 1930s illustration shows much smaller potato halves garnishing a crown roast. Our spuds would not have fit on the plate. (And yes, a single advertisement is not a comprehensive resource.)

30 Ways to Serve Bacon, Armour, 1930s-ish

The recipe says to bake "until soft, basting frequently with the syrup in the pan until well candied." I don't know what a "well candied" potato looks like, but I figured they were done when the syrup was too thick to drip down to the bottom of the pan. However, the potatoes weren't quite done when I stuck in a fork. Either our spuds are a lot bigger than the recipe intended, or I didn't parboil them long enough. I had planned to serve them for dinner, but they ended up being an extra-late dessert.

This tastes like sweet potato casserole if you didn't mash the potatoes. So if you like the taste of sweet potato casserole but don't like it being a uniform pulp (or if you just want to introduce a little bit of a change), this could be the recipe for you. I'll probably parboil the potatoes a bit longer next time, though.