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Potato Pone
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 generous cupful grated raw sweet potatoes 1 cupful molasses 1 cupful milk 1 teaspoonful powdered ginger ½ teaspoonful powdered cinnamon 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful chopped 1/2 cupful sugar candied orange peel Grate potatoes or put them through meat chopper, add molasses, sugar, milk, Crisco, salt, spices, and orange peel. Mix well, turn into Criscoed fireproof dish and bake in moderate oven till firm. Sufficient for one small pone.
A sweet potato pudding baked until set, from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook. The ingredient list was typeset in two columns and reads scrambled in most reprints; sorted out, it is 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1 generous cup grated raw sweet potato, 1 cup molasses, 1 cup milk, 1 teaspoon ground ginger, 1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon, ½ teaspoon salt, ½ cup sugar, and 1 tablespoon chopped candied orange peel.
- The hinge: grate it rawThe potato goes in uncooked and grated fine, so its starch thickens the custard as it bakes. Cooked or mashed sweet potato gives a dense, heavy pudding instead of the loose, sliceable set a pone should have. A box grater or the fine disc of a food processor stands in for the meat chopper.
- CriscoAll-vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated around 2007 to cut trans fat to under half a gram per serving. Melt the 2 tablespoons before mixing so it disperses; butter or a neutral oil will do the same job here, the book's insistence notwithstanding.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F. "Till firm" will be something like 60 to 75 minutes in a 1- to 1½-quart dish, longer if the dish is deep. The center should be set with only a slight wobble and the top darkened and slightly crusted.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than the table molasses of 1913 and will overwhelm the spice. With a full cup of molasses plus half a cup of sugar this is a very sweet pudding by current taste; cutting the sugar to a third of a cup does no harm to the texture.
- "Criscoed" dishSimply greased. Grease generously — molasses puddings stick hard, and a glass or earthenware dish releases better than metal.
- Candied orange peelChop it fine; supermarket candied peel is often coarse and tough. Grated fresh orange zest, about 2 teaspoons, gives a cleaner flavor if good peel is not to hand.
- Yield and serving"One small pone" is not defined in the book; the quantities suggest something like four to six servings, and a 1-quart dish suits them. Serve warm rather than hot, when the set has firmed, with unsweetened whipped cream or plain cream to cut the molasses.
Sweet potato pone is a dish of the American South, and the name carries its own history: pone is generally traced to a Virginia Algonquian word for something baked, recorded by English colonists in the early seventeenth century and later attached to cornbread made without a raising agent. Applied to grated raw sweet potato bound with molasses and milk, it names a pudding rather than a bread, and versions appear in Southern manuscript and printed cookbooks in the nineteenth century. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco is characteristic of that book's method: Procter & Gamble had Marion Harris Neil rewrite a broad range of familiar American recipes with Crisco in place of the butter or lard they had always used, so that a home cook meeting the new shortening in 1913 would find it in dishes she already knew.