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Potato Pone
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 generous cupful grated raw sweet potatoes 1 cupful molasses 1 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger 1/2 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful chopped candied orange peel 1/2 cupful sugar Grate potatoes or put them through meat chopper, add molasses, sugar, milk, Crisco, salt, spices, and orange peel. Mix well, turn into Criscoed fireproof dish and bake in moderate oven till firm.
Sufficient for one small pone.
A Southern sweet potato pudding written for the Crisco kitchen: the original gives no pan size, no oven time and no serving count, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Grate raw, not cookedThe whole character of pone depends on raw sweet potato grated fine, which releases starch and sets the pudding as it bakes. A food processor's fine shredding disc stands in for the meat chopper; the coarse disc gives a stringy result.
- Moderate oven350F. The pone wants a slow, even set rather than a browned crust.
- Time, since none is givenIn a shallow dish of about 1 to 1.5 quarts, allow 60 to 90 minutes. "Till firm" means the centre no longer wobbles when the dish is nudged; a knife inserted at the middle should come out clean of liquid.
- Stir it once or twice earlySome sweet potato pone recipes call for pulling the dish out after the first 20 to 30 minutes and stirring the crust back in, though this recipe does not. It is said to give a denser, chewier result than a set custard with a skin.
- CriscoTwo tablespoons of any neutral solid or liquid fat works; butter is the usual modern choice and improves the flavour. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of the period. Cane syrup or sorghum is closer still to what a Southern cook would have had.
- Candied orange peelSold in tubs at Christmas and often stale; chop it fine so it disperses. Fresh orange zest, about a teaspoon, is a reasonable substitute if the candied peel is old and hard.
- Yield"One small pone" serves four as a side dish or dessert. It is very sweet — a cup of molasses plus half a cup of sugar — and is best served in small portions, warm, with unsweetened cream.
Pone comes from an Algonquian word for something baked, borrowed into English in the early colonial South and attached first to corn breads and then, by extension, to this dense grated sweet potato pudding. Sweet potato pone is a fixture of Black Southern cookery, where the raw grated root and long slow bake produce something between a pudding and a bread, and where cane syrup or sorghum rather than refined sugar carried much of the sweetness. Its appearance here, in a book issued to promote Crisco after the shortening's introduction in 1911, shows how thoroughly the new hydrogenated fat was marketed into every regional tradition its publishers could reach, with two tablespoons of Crisco standing in for the lard or butter a Southern cook would have reached for.