Sweet Potato Pie

I made sweet potato pie.  I followed the recipe from the first google hit for "sweet potato pie," with some alterations.

Is this worth writing about?

I made some very broad statements in the last post, as I'm wont to do.  While I was making the crust for the pie, I kept having to look back at the recipe I adapted from Helen Rennie to remember quantities.  Despite making pastry dough many times, I needed that recipe.  Or at least I needed its list of quantities.  The recipe is not disposable.  It's a kind of helper--somewhere to defer my memory.  It's an instance of a cliche of how the internet has changed the nature of knowledge: it's not so important if one remembers everything, so long as one knows where to look.  In the case of recipes however, the internet is not necessary at all--encyclopedic cookbooks have been serving as cyborg extensions of memory for a long time.

So I don't need to know how to make pastry dough.  I wrote it here in this blog.  The blog remembers how.  To return to my question, is this worth writing, let's compare this to my diaries.  I have boxes and boxes of diaries.  Most of them I have read at least twice.  Reading them is at once familiar and surprising--on the one hand, reading them triggers memories and I might also recall writing what I wrote, on the other, I had, up until reading it, forgotten much if not all of what I wrote.  One is almost always remembering in one way or another, but there is obviously nothing cumulative about it.  Reading a diary doesn't add to a collection of things I remember, but puts me in a different stream of remembering.  Through reading the diary some memories come to life again--I think about them again briefly, they might crop up over and over for a long time.  In other words, the diary must be read, and reading happens in time.  Having "saved" (the anxiety of losing memories drove much of my diary writing) these memories in a diary, only in the unread text of the diary might they be saved.  Only without a reader might the text be said to exist as a totality.  But not really, of course--it isn't anything without being read, is it?

But this blog is not a diary.  I'm not trying to record the ephemera of experience here.  A recipe is simply supposed to record a procedure in a way that's followable.  Actually this isn't so simple, as I've discussed before.  And thankfully.  Wouldn't it be awfully dull if even just a recipe could be written in the universal register?  This suggests another purpose for a recipe: to not be quite followable.  Not that a recipe writer has to try to do this, but a recipe's potential to confuse, mystify, or unintentionally inspire might be valued.  Because apparently I need to subject recipes to the literary theories of decades ago.

The pie was good.  The crust I thought was a bit too hard, although someone else liked it, called it "crunchy."  I prebaked the crust for fifteen minutes or so before filling it, using the sweet potato pieces in tinfoil as a weight to keep the crust from puffing up.  Improvising a weight was the most enjoyable part.  Next time however I'll just fill the unbaked crust, so that the crust turns out softer.

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."

Bizcochuelo de Papa

I had forgotten about Olga de Trejos' La Cocina Practica. This ardently mundane title resurfaced in a--no, the: I haven't done it in five years or more--thorough cleaning of my room. I think the fact that it's in Spanish, a language I more or less understand but am not very comfortable speaking has a great deal to do with my conviction that there is something to be found in this book. In it's range of recipes it is The Joy of Cooking, but unlike Joy it is more concerned with nutrition facts than technique, and rather than outlining recipes in painstaking specificity, de Trejos, with her exceedingly short recipes, seems to assume you know what she's talking about. Not knowing, in my case, is compounded by the fact that Spanish is not my native tongue. However most of the recipes are nonetheless very recognizable. The book seems to be for the most part (and here's the resemblance to Joy) a convenient anthology of European-derived classics.

So I'm fascinated by a dessert I've never ever heard of: Bizcochuelo de Papa, or, in rough English translation, Potato Cake.

1 libra de papas
6 huevos
9 cucharadas de azúcar refinado
jugo de 1 limón y cáscara rallada

Se hace un puré con las papas bien calientes para que quede espumoso. Se le agrega el jugo de limón, la cáscara rallada y las 6 yemas bien batidas, con el azúcar. Se baten las claras a punto de nieve y se incorporan suavemente a la mescla anterior. Se coloca en un molde engrasado, se espolvorea con azúcar refinado y se hornea a calor moderado.

Nasty lightining isn't it?

At first, having no idea what bizcochuelo meant, I thought it was a kind of potato pudding, because of the large quantity of eggs. The eggs are separated and the whites are beaten into frothy peaks. I like the spanish metaphor for this: one beats them "a punto de nieve"--"to the point of snow" or "into snow." The beaten egg whites, in my mind, make it a kind of angel food cake, but with potatoes. Why use potatoes in a dessert? The exotic imagination boggles.

My bad English translation of the recipe:

1 pound of potatoes
6 eggs
9 tablespoons sugar
juice of 1 lemon and its zest

Make a pure with the hot potatoes so that they stay fresh (sparkling? in spanish espumoso) Mix in the lemon juice, zest and the six egg yolks, beaten well with the sugar. Beat the egg whites to high peaks and fold in the yolk-potato mixture. Put in a greased mold and sprinkle with sugar and bake to a golden brown.

Yes, you have to see three photos of potatoes.

You might notice there is no oven temperature, or, for that matter, baking time. Nor is any shape or size of baking mold specified. But what I really love is the way the recipe begins in the middle of the action. Never mind how the potatoes are cooked, or even if they're cooked--just puree them when they're hot, so that they remain... what? Perhaps someone could help me out with what espumoso means here?

Not nearly yellow enough.

I decided to try it anyway, making the following assumptions: the potatoes would be boiled and mashed without any of the water, the baking temperature would be 350 F, and the baking pan would be whatever I had that seems about the right size to accommodate the batter.

My friend who agreed to join me in this endeavor (as in to make another version and tell me about it) commented that it seems like a lot of eggs for not very much potato. I agree, but when I began mixing it together it began to make sense: the potato paste is very dry, and the six yolks are just enough. Well, five might do.

 

This, as well, was more yellow.  And on the right side.

The result was something very nothing--pleasant and delicate. The metaphysical implications of describing it as “very nothing” are familiarly appalling, but. Why not give (or allow) it a bit of fruit and/or a glaze? Doesn't this little cake look sad and alone?

PS I just realized that's calor moderado not color moderado. So the recipe does specify oven temperature, albeit vaguely, but not how to tell when it's done.