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Sweet Potato Pie
One pint potatoes, boiled and mashed with a teacup sweet milk, and run through a colander. Beat separately four eggs; cream one teacup butter with one of sugar. Beat in the yolks, then the potatoes, grate in half a nutmeg, pour in a large wineglass of brandy or good whiskey, and last of all, stir in the frothed whites. Bake in deep pie plates, lined with paste, without a top crust. Sift powdered sugar over the pies.
Irish potato pie may be made in the same way; only adding the juice and grated rind of a lemon.--Mrs. T.
A brandy-scented sweet potato custard, lightened with beaten whites so it bakes closer to a soufflé than the dense pies most people know. The measurements are mid-nineteenth-century household units and need translating before you start.
- A pint of potatoesVolume, not weight: 2 cups of hot mashed sweet potato, which takes roughly 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 lb of raw potatoes. Bake rather than boil them if you want a drier, more concentrated filling than the original allows.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than a modern measuring cup; period usage varies, commonly somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. Take it as 3/4 cup here for milk, butter and sugar alike, and understand that three-quarters of a cup of butter to a pint of potato makes a very rich filling.
- WineglassA large wineglass of the period is about 1/4 cup, roughly 2 fluid ounces. Brandy suits the spice better than whiskey; some alcohol bakes off but the flavour stays.
- Half a nutmegThat is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons freshly grated, which will be pronounced. Scale it back if you want the nutmeg less forward, though the original clearly intends it to show.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe frothed whites are what make this pie distinct. Beat them to soft peaks and fold them into the warm-but-not-hot base at the very end. Beaten in hard, or added to a hot mixture, they collapse and you get an ordinary dense potato custard.
- Paste and no top crust"Paste" is plain pie pastry. Because the filling is wet and the bake is long, partly blind-bake the shell — about 15 minutes at 400F with weights — before filling.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A custard pie of this kind wants a hot start to set the crust and a moderate finish: 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is set with only a slight wobble.
- Yield and finishingEnough for two 9-inch pies, or one deep-dish with filling left over. The pie will puff in the oven and sink as it cools; sift the powdered sugar over it once cool, not while hot, or it dissolves.
- Irish potato pie"Irish potato" is the ordinary white potato, named to distinguish it from the sweet. The lemon variation is essential there — without acid and perfume, a white-potato custard tastes flat and starchy.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from recipes sent in by Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end with a name or a set of initials like Mrs. T. Sweet potato pie belongs to a long Southern line of vegetable custards — pumpkin, squash, carrot, white potato — in which a starchy purée stands in for the ground almonds or breadcrumbs of older English pudding pies, and the whole is bound with eggs, enriched with butter and milk, and spiced with nutmeg. The recipe pairs sweet potato with brandy and nutmeg, and calls for folding in separately beaten whites, a technique often associated with eighteenth-century English pudding practice, when lightness was the mark of a well-made dish. It also casually offers an "Irish potato" version, with lemon called in to give the blander one a reason to exist.