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Sweet Potato Pone
3 LARGE SWEET POTATOES I CUP MOLASSES I LEMON, JUICE AND GRATED RIND I TEASPOON GINGER OR 1/2 TEASPOON CINNAMON AND 1/4 TEASPOON NUTMEG 3 CUPS WATER I TABLESPOON MELTED BUTTER Grate sweet potatoes on coarse grater. There should be enough to fill about 4 cups. Add remaining ingredients, mix well and pour into well buttered baking dish or thick frying pan. Bake in moderate oven until brown on top, stir crust into pudding also stirring in any browned portion from sides and bottom. Let brown again and repeat. Add a little hot water if necessary and continue until you have a nice brown pudding. Eat hot or cold, with or without cream or sauce.
This pudding accommodates itself both to materials and baking conditions. Milk may be substituted for water, 2-4 eggs and a handful of raisins may be added to make it richer; and it may be baked in oven, reflector oven, or Dutch oven.
A grated sweet potato pudding built for a campfire or a wood range, where the cook watches the crust rather than the clock. The stirring is the whole technique.
- The hinge: stir the crust in, three or four timesThe hinge: stir the crust in, repeatedly -- The browned top and the caramelized film on the sides and bottom are the flavor of the dish. Let a skin form, scrape it into the soft middle, level it off, and let it brown again. The recipe has you do this at least twice and then continue until the pudding is a good brown.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F. The recipe gives no time; at that heat expect something on the order of 1 1/2 to 2 hours, most of it unattended between stirrings. In a Dutch oven, aim for a bed of coals under and a heavier ring on the lid to get the top color.
- Grate coarse, and by hand if you canAbout 4 cups of loosely packed grated raw sweet potato, which is close to 1 1/2 to 2 lb of potatoes. A food processor shredding disc works, but the fine grating disc turns them to puree and the pudding sets dense instead of shaggy.
- 3 cups liquid is not a typoThe mixture goes into the dish looking alarmingly soupy. The grated potato absorbs it as the starch swells. Resist the urge to reduce it, and add the extra hot water the recipe mentions if the pone stiffens before it has browned three times.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter at a full cup. A cup of molasses is the only sweetener here, so the pone is dark and mildly bitter-edged rather than dessert-sweet.
- Ginger measureOne teaspoon of ground ginger against a cup of molasses is assertive. The cinnamon-and-nutmeg alternative gives a milder, more pie-like result.
- YieldFills a 9-inch square dish or a 10-inch cast iron skillet and serves 6 to 8. It slices better cold than hot, and it reheats well in a covered pan.
- The enrichmentsMilk for water, 2 to 4 eggs, and raisins move the dish from a plain camp pudding toward a custardy pone. With eggs, watch the bottom more closely, since it will catch sooner.
Pone comes from an Algonquian word recorded by early English colonists as apan or appone, meaning something baked, and it entered American English first as the name for cornmeal bread. Sweet potato pone is a different animal that borrowed the word: a grated-root pudding long associated with the kitchens of the coastal South and the Caribbean, where cooks made the same dish with cassava or with yams. Molasses rather than sugar, and water rather than milk or eggs, mark this as the plain version -- cheap, keepable, and made from a crop that stores in a cellar all winter. Its appearance in an outdoor cooking book is practical rather than sentimental: nothing in it spoils on the trail, it wants no beating or leavening, and it will bake equally well in a reflector oven propped by the fire or in a Dutch oven buried in coals, which is exactly the flexibility the author advertises in the last line.