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Sliced Potato Pie
Steam or boil the potatoes. Slice and lay in a syrup of sugar seasoned with whole cloves or allspice. Scald and set aside till nearly cool. Then place the slices evenly on the bottom of a deep pie-plate lined with crust. Put in each pie a tablespoonful of butter in bits, a wine-glass of brandy or Madeira wine.--Mrs. S. T.
A syrup-and-spice sliced pie in the older English tradition, closer to a spiced apple pie in construction than to the mashed sweet potato pies that later took the name. The original assumes you know how to build and bake a two-crust fruit pie, and gives no oven, no quantities for the syrup, and no top crust.
- Which potatoThe recipe says only "potatoes." In a Virginia book of this period a sweet dish called simply "potato pie" is more often than not sweet potato, though sweetened white-potato pies also appear in books of the era. White potatoes will hold their slices but taste flat against brandy and cloves; a firm-fleshed sweet potato is the likelier reading.
- Cook them shortSteam or boil only until a skewer meets slight resistance, roughly 15-20 minutes for whole medium sweet potatoes. Fully tender potatoes will not slice cleanly and will collapse into mush once the hot syrup goes over them.
- The syrup is unmeasuredNo proportions are given. A workable syrup for one 9-inch pie is about 1 cup sugar to 3/4 cup water with 6-8 whole cloves or a teaspoon of whole allspice; you want enough to submerge the slices, not enough to flood the crust.
- "Scald and set aside"This means bring the syrup and slices just to the boiling point, then pull the pan off the heat and let it cool nearly to room temperature. The slices take up spice and sugar while cooling, and cool filling keeps the bottom crust from going slack.
- A wine-glassIn nineteenth-century American cookbooks a wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. Whole cloves should be fished out before the slices are laid in the shell.
- Top crust and ovenThe original gives neither. A "deep pie-plate lined with crust" filled with syrupy slices and dotted butter is usually finished with a top crust or lattice, vented, though an open pie is equally possible from the text. As a modern reconstruction: bake at 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 30-35 minutes, until the crust is set and the juices bubble thickly at the vents.
- YieldOne deep 9-inch pie, six to eight servings. Serve barely warm or at room temperature; hot from the oven the syrup runs.
Sweet potato desserts run all through Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, each signed with initials as "Mrs. S. T." is here. This version arguably preserves an older English habit of treating the root as a fruit: sliced, candied in spiced syrup, and baked between crusts exactly as apples or quinces would be, though the line of descent is a surmise rather than a documented one. The mashed, custard-style sweet potato pie that now dominates American tables existed alongside it, and the two appear together in books of this era; the sliced form gradually lost out, probably because it takes two operations and a cooling period rather than one bowl. The brandy or Madeira is a period marker in itself. Madeira was the fortified wine of choice in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South, a prestige import favoured partly through colonial trade arrangements and for its stability in a hot climate, and it turns up in Virginia recipes for everything from terrapin to pie.