Spiced Grated Sweet Potato Pudding Cake (1859)

From The Young Housekeeper’s Friend (Revised and Enlarged), 1859

The Story Behind This Recipe

A widow, a pen name and "The Best Cookbook"

Mary Ann Hooker was born on April 17, 1796, in Goshen, Connecticut, with a family name that carried weight. She descended from Thomas Hooker, the Puritan minister who founded the Connecticut colony, and her father was the Rev. Asahel Hooker. She studied at the Litchfield Female Academy in 1810, and in 1818 she married Elias Cornelius, another minister. They had six children. He was often away on missionary travels, and when he died in 1832 she was left to raise the children. Before she wrote about food, she wrote religious tracts, including Letters on Christian Education for the American Tract Society, and signed it simply "A Mother."

Later, living in Andover, Massachusetts, she wrote The Young Housekeeper’s Friend for newly married women who, in her view, had been let down by older receipt books. She gave beginners plain technical instructions and, as one modern bookseller notes, "many exact measurements." In 1849 the Boston Evening Transcript praised it under the headline "The Best Cookbook." It was still being revised and reprinted in 1859, decades before Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book of 1896. She died in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1880.

From "potato" to pone

For a long stretch of history, a recipe calling for "potatoes" might have meant sweet ones. The plant comes from the Americas and was grown in ancient Peru. Europeans called it just the potato, and American colonists only started saying "sweet potato" after the 1740s, to tell it apart from the white kind. That is why we often can’t tell which potato Amelia Simmons meant in the potato puddings of American Cookery (1796), the first American cookbook.

"Pone" probably came into English from Algonquian words meaning "baked." In the colonies it meant a plain bread, often made of corn, that was eaten cold. In time cooks made pones of sweet potato, apple and pumpkin as well. Sweetening a root vegetable this way owes more to old European carrot puddings than to West African cooking. Sweet potato pie and pone later became soul-food favorites, appearing in the recipe pages of Black newspapers such as the Afro-American. Mrs. Cornelius’s version is the fancy Northern cousin. Some pones leaned on molasses, but hers calls for sugar, lemon, butter, rose-water and twelve eggs.

A deep pan for the feast day

Kitchens were changing while Cornelius wrote. Between the book’s first edition and its revision, coal ovens were replacing brick ovens fired with wood. She kept her directions for building and using a brick oven while admitting that fashion was moving on. She still explained how long to roast meat before a fire in winter versus summer. A two-hour bake in deep pans would have suited either oven.

Her measuring mixes old and new in the same way. The potato and sugar are weighed, the milk counted in pints and the butter given by the quarter pound. Then come "a nutmeg," a "little" cinnamon and mace, and "a little more than three pints" of milk, all left to the cook’s judgment. Sweet potatoes later became a Thanksgiving fixture, and the pone traveled as far as Liberia. That country was settled by Black Americans in the 1800s, and sweet potato pone is still eaten at its own Thanksgiving. A dish meant to be served cold can be baked ahead, which suits any feast.