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Sweet Potato Pies
1. Make by the preceding receipt, using sherry wine instead of brandy. They need careful baking of a light color, to be good. Powdered sugar over. 2. Slice cooked sweet potatoes into the crusts strew sugar over plentifully, and broken blades of mace, and small lumps of butter. In each pie pour half cupful of wine. Bake slowly.
Two variants sit in this entry: a smooth custard-style pie that depends on an earlier receipt, and a sliced, layered pie built like an apple pie. The second stands on its own; the first does not.
- The missing first halfNumber 1 is only an amendment — it tells you to follow the receipt printed immediately before it, swapping sherry for the brandy. Without that page you have no proportions at all, so treat number 2 as the usable recipe here.
- "Bake slowly"Period cooks' "slow" oven is usually given a modern equivalent of somewhere around 300–325F, though the book itself states no temperature. For the sliced pie the low heat lets the sugar, butter and wine reduce into a syrup without scorching the crust edges, and the potato slices are already cooked.
- Light color is the hingeThe instruction "careful baking of a light color" is doing real work. Sweet potato fillings brown and crack quickly; bake until the center is just set with a slight wobble and pull it before the surface takes any color.
- Cooked sweet potatoesBoiled or baked and cooled firm, not roasted to collapse. Slices about a quarter-inch thick hold their shape; anything softer turns to mash under the sugar and wine.
- Blades of maceWhole mace is the lacy aril of the nutmeg, sold in brittle orange-brown blades. Broken pieces are meant to be scattered through and are not especially pleasant to bite into; a small quantity of ground mace gives a similar, though not identical, flavor without the fragments.
- Half a cupful of wineFour fluid ounces per pie is a great deal of liquid with no thickener behind it. A shallow tin will boil over; use a deep dish, and expect the filling to be saucy rather than sliceable.
- Powdered sugar overApplied after baking and cooling, not before. On a hot pie it dissolves into a damp film.
- YieldThe one measured quantity in number 2, the wine, is written per pie; the sugar, mace and butter are left to the cook's judgment. On a modern nine-inch tin, expect six to eight servings.
Sweet potato pie belongs to the older English line of root and vegetable sweet pies — carrot, parsnip, pumpkin — that arrived in America and found in the sweet potato an ingredient better suited to the job than any of them. It became firmly associated with Southern and African American cooking, and the two forms given here may reflect an older split: the custard pie, and the far less common sliced pie, which treats the potato exactly as a cook of the same era would treat apples, with sugar, spice, butter and a top crust. The brandy and sherry are worth noting, and mace is often said to have been favored for pale custards because it seasons without darkening them.