Second-Stab Saturday: Candied Sweet Potatoes without all the fuss

My great-grandmother didn't have to make these the long way.

Candied Sweet Potatoes 3 pounds sweet potatoes (just round to the nearest potato) 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 Boil or microwave the potatoes until done. Then pick off the skins and cut them into pieces a little larger than bite-size. Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a large frying pan. Reduce heat to medium and boil until thick and syrupy. Turn off the heat, add the butter, salt, (and cinnamon, if desired), and stir until all is melted and mixed. Add the potatoes to the pan. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly and scooping the syrup off of the pan and pouring it on top of the potatoes. (A large serving spoon is better than a flat wooden spoon for this. Continue cooking until all of the syrup sticks to the potatoes. They are done when the syrup no longer forms puddles in the pan when you stop stirring. If desired, you can use orange juice instead of all or part of the water when making the syrup.  Source: Handwritten recipe, probably 1920s-1930s Notebook of Hanora Frances "Hannah" Dannehy O'Neil

As I said the last time we made my great-grandmother's candied sweet potatoes, I don't like them but everyone else does. (I think everyone who cooks a lot ends up with at least a few recipes like that). Well, when you don't like something, you rarely want to spend too long make it, even if you're cooking it to be nice. This brings us to the new (to me) shortcut: doing these over the stove.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I first saw a recipe for candied sweet potatoes in Mrs. Wilson's newspaper column. Instead of parboiling the potatoes and baking them, she told her readers to fully cook the potatoes and then put them in syrup over a stove burner. 

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

I probably should have done this in a bigger frying pan, but the potatoes came out all right (even if I had to keep putting escapees back).

I'm not sure that I'm making these right. An image search for "candied sweet potatoes" yields pictures of neatly sliced sweet potatoes with a perfectly even glaze. Mine always come out smushed, no matter how gentle I am with my basting. But I've had no complaints.

I hate to say my great-grandmother wasted a lot of effort on her candied sweet potatoes, but these were ready after about two minutes on the stove. I wouldn't mind the longer baking time if I could forget the potatoes until the timer went off. But her way involves constantly coming back to baste. I thought that perhaps the long baking time allows the syrup to really penetrate the potatoes. But you couldn't tell the difference. 

With the printed-and-pasted recipes in my great-grandmother's book, it's easy for me to imagine that she skipped over the unnecessary fusswork. But she wrote this one out by hand, so I guess she actually kept coming back and bending over the oven with a basting spoon.  

As I said last time, these taste like a sweet potato casserole if you didn't get out a potato masher. Since I don't like sweet potato casserole, I can't say that I love these. But everyone else seems to like them, so this must be a good recipe. You can't argue against a well-scraped plate.