Sweet Potato Buns
Boil and mash a sweet potato. Rub into it as much flour as will make it like bread. Add spice and sugar to your taste, with a spoonful of yeast. When it has risen well work in a piece of butter. Bake it in small rolls, to be eaten hot with butter.
Mashed sweet potato makes these rolls tender, faintly sweet, and remarkably long-keeping.
- Proportions to tasteAim for about 1 cup mashed sweet potato to 2–2½ cups flour — enough to make a soft, kneadable dough.
- “A spoonful of yeast”The old liquid barm converts to about 1¼ tsp active dry yeast (roughly half a packet), proofed in a little warm water or milk.
- “Spice” decodedCooks usually meant warm baking spices — cinnamon, nutmeg, or mace; start with ½ tsp and adjust.
- Butter in after the riseWorking softened butter into the risen dough enriches the crumb; expect a second short rise once the buns are shaped.
- Bake and serve hotForm small rolls and bake at about 375°F until golden; these are meant to be eaten warm, split and buttered.
Sweet potatoes are native to the Americas and became a cornerstone of Southern cooking, valued because they thrived where wheat struggled and stored well through the winter. Cooks learned that mashed sweet potato folded into a wheat dough did wonderful things: it added moisture, natural sweetness, and a tender crumb, and it helped the bread stay fresh for days. Just as usefully, it stretched the flour — a real economy in a region where wheat was often scarce and, during the Civil War, genuinely hard to get. Sweet potato rolls and biscuits remain a Southern holiday tradition.
From page 55 of the 1904 edition.
Original page from the book
