Raw sweet potato grated and baked with spice and a little sweetener into a dense, chewy, caramelized pone — a rustic ancestor of sweet potato pie, made without a crust. The old-time sweet that used the root and almost nothing else.
Sweet potato pone predates the more refined sweet potato pie — it is the older, crustless, country way, made from the root that fed enslaved and sharecropping families when wheat flour was scarce. The sweet potato itself was the diaspora's stand-in for the African yam, and the pone is one of its most ancestral forms.
Sweet potato is an ancestral powerhouse — one serving exceeds a full day of vitamin A as beta-carotene, supporting eye health and immunity, with fiber for the gut and blood sugar, and potassium for blood pressure. Because the pone uses grated raw sweet potato baked slowly, much of the root's nutrition survives, and keeping the added sugar and fat low lets the potato itself be the substance. It is a dessert that is genuinely a vegetable.
Grate raw sweet potato (and sometimes a little fresh ginger and orange zest), mix with egg, a modest sweetener, warm spices, and a little fat and milk, and bake low and slow, 60-90 minutes, stirring once or twice early so the edges caramelize and the center sets dense and chewy. Serve warm in spoonfuls.
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