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Sweet Potato Pudding
1 quart grated sweet potatoes. 10 eggs, well beaten. 3 cupfuls sugar. 1 cupful flour. 1 cupful butter. 1 quart milk. Bake slowly in a pan. Serve with sauce.-Mrs. G. A. B.
Sweet Potato Pudding.
Grate three or four large sweet potatoes and put them immediately in three pints of sweet milk to prevent them from turning dark. Beat six eggs light, add four ounces melted butter, and mix well with potatoes and milk. Add eight tablespoonfuls of sugar, and season with lemon or vanilla. Bake without a crust.--Mrs. W. C. R.
Sweet Potato Pudding.
Boil one and a half pounds potatoes very tender. Add half a pound butter, and rub both together through a sieve. Then add a small cupful milk, six eggs, one and a half cupful sugar. Beat all together and add little salt, the juice and rind of a lemon. Then beat again, and prepare pastry. Bake twenty minutes. It may be baked without pastry. Bake twenty minutes. It may be baked without pastry. Irish potato pudding may be made by the same recipe.--Mrs. A. C.
Three versions from three contributors, and they are not interchangeable: two start with raw grated potato and one with boiled and sieved potato. The raw ones behave like a custard that has to set slowly; the boiled one is essentially the filling for a sweet potato pie.
- "Bake slowly"A low oven, in modern terms somewhere around 300 to 325F. Raw grated potato in a milk-and-egg custard needs a long, gentle bake; expect well over an hour in a buttered dish, until the centre is set but still trembling. Too high a heat risks curdling the eggs before the potato softens.
- The 20-minute bakeMrs. A. C.'s boiled-potato version is already cooked through, so only the eggs need to set. Twenty minutes is short by modern standards and probably presumes a shallow pan; in a 9-inch dish at around 350F expect to need considerably longer, and to judge by whether the centre is set.
- "Sweet milk"Plain fresh whole milk. The term exists to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have curdled here.
- Quantities in old weightsFour ounces of melted butter is half a cup; half a pound is a full cup. A quart of grated sweet potato is roughly a pound and a quarter of raw potato, or two large ones. Mrs. W. C. R.'s "three or four large" is genuinely imprecise — start with three and judge by whether the batter pours thickly rather than runs.
- Why the potato is put straight into milkGrated sweet potato oxidises and greys within minutes. Mrs. W. C. R.'s instruction to drop it immediately into the milk is the practical hinge of that recipe; grate directly over the bowl rather than onto a board.
- Ten eggsMrs. G. A. B.'s proportions are for a large family pan: a quart of milk, ten eggs, three cups sugar. It will fill a large baking dish and serve a dozen or more.
- SweetnessThree cups of sugar to a quart of milk is very sweet by current taste, and the moist-fleshed cultivars common today may be sweeter than some of the drier, starchier varieties available to these cooks. Reducing the sugar is a matter of preference.
- "Serve with sauce"A dessert sauce of the usual kind: a lemon sauce, a thin custard, or hard sauce. Mrs. A. C.'s version carries lemon juice and rind in the pudding itself and calls for no sauce.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was first published in 1878 and drew on contributions from some two hundred and fifty women in Virginia and neighbouring states, which is why the same dish appears three times over with three different sets of proportions and only initials to tell the cooks apart. Sweet potato pudding sits at the point where a boiled-and-mashed vegetable dish turns into a dessert: the raw-grated versions here, thin with milk and set slowly, recall the older English tradition of grated-root puddings, while Mrs. A. C.'s sieved, buttered, lemon-scented filling baked in pastry is close kin to the sweet potato pie still made across the South. The sweet potato was a staple of Southern kitchens, and its cultivation and cookery in the region owed a great deal to enslaved African American cooks. Mrs. A. C.'s note that Irish potato pudding may be made by the same recipe shows the two potatoes still treated here as parallel options for a sweet dish.