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Sweet Potato Pudding
Wash and simmer gently half a pound sweet potatoes; when half done take out, peel, and when cold grate them. Stir to a cream a scant cup butter and six table-spoons sugar (white), add a grated nutmeg, a tea-spoon beaten mace, juice and grated peel of a lemon, a wine-glass wine, one of brandy. Stir these ingredients together. Beat four eggs and add to mixture, alternating with the potato, a little at a time. At the last, stir all, very hard, pour in a buttered dish and bake three quarters of an hour. To be eaten cold.-From Tenn.
A rich, custard-dense baked pudding of the old Southern school, closer to an English "potato pudding" than to the marshmallow-topped casserole the name now suggests. Two things decide whether it works: the potato must be grated raw-ish, not mashed, and the oven must stay gentle.
- Half-cook, then grateThe potatoes are simmered only until half done, cooled, and grated on a coarse grater. Cook them through and they will mash rather than shred, and the pudding loses the light, slightly fibrous texture the method is aiming at. Chilling them firm first makes grating possible at all.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal. Bake at 325-350F for the stated three quarters of an hour; the mixture is an egg custard and will curdle and weep at high heat. It is done when the centre is set with only a slight wobble.
- A wine-glassIn American cookbooks of this period a wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces, roughly a quarter cup. So a quarter cup each of wine (sherry or Madeira suits the dish) and brandy. That is a good deal of liquid for half a pound of potato and is part of why the pudding is soft.
- A scant cup of butterJust under 8 ounces, or two sticks. Against only half a pound of sweet potato this is a very high proportion of fat; the result is dense and confection-like rather than vegetable-tasting. Halving the butter gives a more familiar pudding, at some cost to the period character.
- A grated nutmegA whole nutmeg is around 2 to 3 teaspoons grated, which with a teaspoon of mace makes an aggressively spiced pudding by current taste. Both spices lose potency in the jar, so pre-ground substitutes will read weaker; start with half if you are unsure.
- Adding the eggsThe eggs go in alternately with the potato, a little at a time, to keep the creamed butter from breaking. Eggs of the period were often smaller and more variable than today's large; four modern large eggs are ample.
- The dish and the yieldA buttered 8-inch dish is about right. It serves six to eight in small portions, which is how a pudding this rich wants to be eaten.
- Served coldThe instruction is not incidental. Warm, the butter is loose and the pudding tastes greasy; cold, it firms into something sliceable and the wine and lemon come forward. Chill it several hours.
Sweet potato pudding belongs to a long line of English root-vegetable puddings -- carrot, parsnip, ordinary potato -- that were baked with butter, eggs, sugar, sack and nutmeg and served as a sweet course. The sweet potato, cheap and abundant across the South, slid neatly into that template, and by the mid-nineteenth century versions of this pudding appear in many Southern manuscript and printed collections. The wine and brandy, the whole nutmeg and mace, and the lemon peel look to be inherited from that older English pudding tradition rather than invented locally. The Dixie Cook Book was assembled from contributions gathered across the Southern states, and the tag "From Tenn." marks this as one household's version sent in for the collection -- which is why the oven heat and the dish size go unstated, the contributor taking them for granted.