The recipe below calls for condensed milk.
Condensed milk hails from the days when the quality of milk could not be guaranteed and refrigeration was iffy anyway. It’s exactly what it sounds like, milk boiled down until a lot of the water is gone. It’s sweet and rich. People used to thin it out with water to approximate fresh milk. It doesn’t taste like fresh milk.
When we ran out of milk, we’d use it in coffee or over cornflakes. My grandmother simmered Cream of Wheat with butter and water, then gradually replaced the water, as it boiled away, with evaporated milk and lots of sugar. It makes a rich, sweet porridge, nothing like the watery cereal most people eat.
Anyhow, I promised an actual recipe, so here you go.
What?
Doesn’t everybody write the family recipe for sweet potato pie crosswise on their November 2000 bank statement in pink glitter pen? (If you wish to fathom my state of mind at that time, please remember that in 10/2000 my first child was eleven months old.)
Last night, I tried to translate my pink notes into an actual food item. Here is the recipe I used:
3 sweet potatoes
1¼ cup sugar
1 can evaporated milk
½ tsp vanilla
3 eggs
2 frozen pie crusts
I roasted the sweet potatoes in their (scrubbed) skins at 450 for, what, an hour? It was probably too long. They should be roasted until they are soft.
Then, I cut them, still unpeeled, into large chunks and put them through my potato ricer. I mixed in all the other ingredients and filled two still-frozen pie crusts to the top (I used a ladle).
I baked them at 350, my grandmother’s favorite oven temperature, for 40 minutes. Then I put the pies on racks, and chased my daughter away every five minutes until they were cool.
Here is what I made:
It was sweet.
Nice, if you like that sort of thing.
Next time, I’ll try using even less sugar and less evaporated milk. I get the impression I’m going to need to find the right ratio of sweet potato to milk — the pie didn’t have the rich sweet potato flavor I remember. I do like the egginess of the smooth custard. I swear it was saltier than this — I will add a pinch of that, too, and see what happens.
Here is what I learned:
My daughter loves sweet potato pie. This morning, I told her it was not a breakfast food, but we’re all adults here, and adults definitely eat pie for breakfast.
However, I did slip a slice into her lunch, remembering how my grandmother used to tuck Lorna Doone cookies into mine as a surprise.
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