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Baked Yam Pudding
Sweet potatoes will do, but the large yams grown in the sandy soils of Louisiana and Texas are better for mealiness, and have less of the potato flavor. 1 1/2 pounds of potato. 3/4 pound of fresh butter. 1/2 pound of sugar. 12 eggs. 1/4 pint of brandy. 1/2 pint of sherry. 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract.
Boil the yams or sweet potatoes after paring, in salted water, and mash the required amount of dry puree through a colander. Mix in the butter while still warm, then the sugar, liquorand vanilla. Separate the eggs, beat the yolks into the mixture, and the whites after whipping to a firm froth. Bake in buttered pans about half an hour. Lemon syrup or wine or brandy sauce. Common potatoes that are very good and mealy can be used in the preceding manner, with more sugar and less wine.
A hotel-scale sweet potato pudding, closer to a baked soufflé than to a pie filling. The proportions are extreme by modern standards and the original gives no oven temperature at all.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirTwelve eggs against a pound and a half of potato means the whipped whites are the entire structure. Fold them in with a spatula in two or three additions and get the pans into the oven at once; beaten in, the batter deflates and bakes dense and weeping.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the stated half hour suits a pudding of this depth; it is set when the centre no longer wobbles as a mass and a knife comes out clean.
- Archaic liquid measuresA quarter pint of brandy is 1/2 cup and a half pint of sherry is 1 cup, on the 16-ounce American pint. That is a cup and a half of spirits in a single batch, and much of the alcohol survives a 30-minute bake.
- "Yams" here are sweet potatoesThe Louisiana and Texas field crop sold as yams is Ipomoea batatas, the same species as any orange sweet potato; true yams are a different genus and are starchy rather than sweet.
- Dry pureePare, boil in salted water, drain thoroughly, and let the potato steam dry in the pan before pressing it through a sieve or colander. Wet puree plus a cup and a half of wine gives a batter too slack for the whites to lift.
- Butter while warmThree-quarters of a pound of butter to a pound and a half of potato is very rich by any measure. Work it in while the puree is still hot so it emulsifies rather than sitting in pools, then let the mixture cool before the yolks go in.
- Pans and yieldThis makes roughly 4 to 5 pounds of batter, enough for two 9-inch buttered dishes or about twelve to sixteen servings. Fill no more than three-quarters full; it rises and then settles.
- The sauceLemon syrup or a wine or brandy sauce is named at the end of the recipe but given no method, and the pudding needs one: the potato and butter are rich but not sharp. Serve warm, since it collapses somewhat as it cools.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century American trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which helps explain the twelve eggs and the three-quarter pound of butter in a single formula. The dish sits within the tradition of Southern sweet potato puddings, and the wine and brandy, the whipped whites and the accompanying sweet sauce echo the older English baked puddings. The word yam is generally traced to a West African term for an edible tuber, carried into American English and then attached, inaccurately, to the orange-fleshed sweet potato — a usage this recipe takes for granted while conceding that "sweet potatoes will do."