Spiced Sweet Potato Yeast Rolls (1860)

From The Virginia Housewife; or, Methodical Cook, 1860

The Story Behind This Recipe

Jefferson’s schoolmate writes a cookbook

Mary Randolph learned her letters in a one-room schoolhouse at Tuckahoe, the Virginia estate where she grew up, alongside young Thomas Jefferson and a crowd of his siblings and cousins. She was born in 1762 at Ampthill, her family’s plantation in Chesterfield County, and in 1780 she married her cousin David Meade Randolph. Their Richmond house, Moldavia, became a hub of Federalist society, and Mary became famous as a hostess. Then her old schoolmate became president and removed David from office. With money running low, Mary opened a boarding house in Richmond, and her reputation as a cook only grew. By 1819 the family had moved to Washington, where she finished The Virginia House-Wife. It came out in 1824.

The Library of Virginia calls it the first American regional cookbook, and it sold right away. It was reprinted at least nineteen times before the Civil War, which explains how a Philadelphia printing from 1860 carries recipes by a woman who died in 1828. The historian Cynthia Kierner saw the book as a Virginian model offered to Southern readers. It was built on Virginia produce and shaped by African, American Indian and European cooking. Most of the actual work in Randolph’s kitchen was done by Black women.

A garden root goes to the tea table

In the American South, the sweet potato sat at the center of African American cooking, while white Americans long treated it as a lesser food. Enslaved people grew it in their own gardens and provision grounds. Randolph’s recipe takes that everyday root and turns it into something for the household’s breakfast or tea table: a yeast roll, spiced and sweetened, finished with butter and served hot with more butter.

The recipe is plain about its star ingredient. The heading says ‘Sweet Potato Buns,’ and the instructions just say ‘a potato.’ That potato may not have looked like the one in today’s grocery bin. The bright orange variety sold as a ‘yam’ didn’t arrive until the 1930s, when Louisiana growers began marketing it.

Yeast from hops, heat from coals

The ‘spoonful of yeast’ is a small phrase that hides a lot of work. In the 1850s, city cooks could sometimes buy brewer’s yeast, but many households kept starters of their own, made from hops, potatoes and even peach leaves. The Fleischmann brothers didn’t open their compressed-cake yeast business in Cincinnati until 1868. The baking took watching, too. A cook might set a cast-iron bake kettle in the coals of an open hearth and keep an eye on the fire, not a dial. Butter shows up twice in the recipe, and Randolph’s book even explained how to build a refrigerator at home.

Nothing here mentions a holiday. In Randolph’s book these are everyday rolls, eaten ‘either for breakfast or tea.’ By the 1970s and ’80s, the sweet potato had become a fixture of holiday dinners. A basket of these buns on a holiday table brings an old breakfast roll to a newer kind of feast, and that’s a perfectly good place for it.