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Sweet Potato Bread
4 roasted sweet potatoes, 1 pint of warm water, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 quart of flour, 1 tablespoonful of salt, 1/2 cup of yeast or 1/2 a compressed cake.
Put the water in a bowl, add the butter, salt, yeast and flour, beat well and stand in a warm place over night. In the morning bake the sweet potatoes, scoop out with a spoon and press through a sieve into the sponge. Beat well; add one egg and sufficient flour to make a soft dough. Knead lightly, roll out and cut into biscuits. Place these in greased baking-pans and when very light bake in a quick oven twenty-five or thirty minutes. When the biscuits are half done, take from the fire, brush over with white of one egg beaten with two tablespoonfuls of water. Put back in the oven until thoroughly done.
A yeast-raised sweet potato biscuit built on an overnight sponge. The ingredient list and the method disagree about when the potatoes are cooked, and that is the first thing to settle.
- Bake the potatoes in the morningThe heading lists roasted sweet potatoes among the sponge ingredients, but the method has you bake them the next day and press them into the risen sponge. Follow the method: the sponge is flour, water, butter, salt and yeast only.
- Old measuresA pint of warm water is 2 cups; a quart of flour is about 4 cups, roughly 1 lb 2 oz. Four sweet potatoes will give anywhere from about 2 to 3 cups of purée depending on size, which may be why the recipe asks for "sufficient flour" afterward rather than a fixed amount.
- YeastHalf a cup of yeast means liquid barm or a homemade yeast starter. Half a compressed cake is roughly 0.3 oz of fresh yeast if you reckon on the modern small cake, though period cakes varied in size. One packet of active dry or instant yeast, 2 1/4 tsp, will raise this sponge overnight in a cool room; less if your kitchen is warm.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400-425F. Twenty-five to thirty minutes is long for small biscuits at that heat, so start checking at 15 minutes and judge by a deep brown bottom and an internal temperature around 200F.
- The egg wash interruptionThe recipe has you take the pans out halfway through and brush on egg white beaten with two tablespoonfuls of water, then return them to finish. Applying it late rather than at the start keeps the wash from darkening too far. Work quickly and shut the door to limit heat loss.
- Handling the doughSweet potato purée makes a slack, sticky dough with little gluten development to spare. Knead only until it comes together, keep it soft rather than stiff, and use a floured hand to pat it out instead of rolling it thin.
- SaltA tablespoon is heavy: about 18 g, or something like 2.5 to 3 percent of the flour weight even after the second addition of flour is counted. With fine table salt, scale back to about 2 teaspoons.
- YieldRoughly two dozen or more biscuits cut at 2 inches, depending on how much flour the purée takes up. They are best the day they are baked and reheat well; the potato keeps them moist longer than a plain baking-powder biscuit.
Sweet potato worked into bread dough is an old economy of the American South and mid-Atlantic, where the crop stored well through winter and stretched wheat flour that had to be bought. There is a practical reason beyond thrift: the starches and sugars in cooked potato feed a yeast sponge vigorously and hold moisture in the crumb, which is why potato rolls and potato bread turn up so often in nineteenth-century collections alongside their sweet potato cousins. An overnight sponge set with barm or a compressed cake and left in a warm place is a common domestic method of the period, before reliable dry yeast and before baking powder had wholly taken over the biscuit. The two-stage bake with an egg-white glaze brushed on partway through is the sort of finishing touch that turns up in late-century cooking-school books.