Sweet potatoes are a holiday classic, so I was pleased to find a hundred-year-old recipe for Glazed Sweet Potatoes. The sweet potatoes are glazed with a sugar sauce and baked until tender. The glaze is made with white sugar (not the brown sugar or maple syrup that is more typically used today). The Glazed Sweet Potatoes were tender and sweet, but they were not immersed in a thick sauce – rather (as the recipe title says) they had a sugar glaze.
Here’s the original recipe:

The old recipe called for boiling the sweet potatoes for 10 minutes to make it easy to slip the skins off them, however, the skins didn’t come off very easily. I don’t think that they were boiled for quite long enough, so when I updated the recipe, I indicated that they should be boiled by 15 minutes.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Glazed Sweet Potatoes
6 medium sweet potatoes
1 teaspoon salt
water
3/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup water
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
Wash sweet potatoes and then place in a Dutch oven or other large pan. Cover with water and add the salt to the water; bring to a boil using high heat. Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool enough to handle. Remove skins from the sweet potatoes. They should slip off easily. Then cut the sweet potatoes in half lengthwise and arrange in a large rectangular casserole dish.
In the meantime, preheat oven to 375° F. And, make the sauce that will be used to glaze the sweet potatoes by putting the sugar and water in a saucepan; stir. Using medium heat, bring to a boil while continuing to stir. Boil for 3 minutes then remove from heat and stir butter into the sauce.
Using a basting brush, spread sugar syrup on the arranged sweet potato halves. Put in oven and bake until tender and the syrup begins to brown (about 30 – 40 minutes). While baking, baste several times with the syrup.