SWEET POTATO PONE

4 cups raw yams
2 cups molasses or dark corn syrup
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup warm milk

Mix ingredients; pour into greased baking dish. Bake in moderate oven until nice crust forms on top (about 45 minutes). Serve hot with unsweetened cream, plain or whipped.

Consider this a pie without crust.
Sweet Pone was a great white trash favorite.

Ernest Matthew Mickler, 1986 and reprints, "White Trash Cooking," p. 99.

PLAIN OL' POTATO PONE
(can be modified and put in pie shell if desired)

1 cup milk
3 medium-size sweet potatoes
1 cup molasses
2 teaspoons cinammon
3 eggs
1/4 stick oleomargerine

Bake sweet potatoes (yams) or use leftovers. Take off skins and mash them up. To the potatoes, add all other ingredients. Mix well and put in an iron skillet and bake at 350 F for 25-30 minutes.
Now this is a real pone. "Dig in and make yourself at home- if you ain't, you oughta be."
A favorite of Betty Sue Swilley.
Recipe from "White Trash Cooking," p. 99.

Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mocking Bird," called this book a sociological document of beauty. "... with two generations of prosperity white trash looks like gentry- we've long needed something other than the ballot box to remind us of their presence. "White Trash Cooking" is a beautiful testament to a stubborn people of proud and poignant heritage" (written in 1886).