Southern Cooks and Sweet Potato Recipes
Sweet potatoes bank for storage, 1908, Courtesy of Library of Congres
Today we share this story in celebration of National Potato Month.
An excerpt from Southern Food and Civil Rights. The New York Amsterdam News food writer Ann Schuyler, most likely a southerner, had this to say about the southern cook and sweet potato recipes:
We don't have just one of two ways of cooking these succulent tubers. We use them candied, and delicate soufflés that quiver as they come to the table, combined with apples, and in pies that for sheer flavor leave the pumpkin pie of New Englanders in the background. They go into biscuits and into—pone but it would be impossible to list the many uses to which we put them. Suffice to say that each is better than the last and it's purely a question of individual taste which one prefers…To descend from the poetry of flavored the pros of dollars and cents, you find the sweet potato recommending itself from the point of view of economy too. Sweet potatoes yield island and 58 cal per pound against 378 and white potatoes. And of course you shouldn't we use in cooking them is a concentrated fuel food which adds to their food value as well as their goodness. Taken together it would be hard to beat sugar and sweet potatoes as a source of body heat and energy at low cost.
Candied Sweet Potatoes Recipe
Ingredients
Boiled sweet potatoes
Butter
Sugar
Cinnamon
Directions
Cut boiled sweet potatoes into long slices. Place in an earthen dish; put one-quarter teaspoon butter on each slice; sprinkle well with sugar. Pour in sufficient water to cover the bottom of the dish. Dust lightly with cinnamon. Bake until the sugar and butter have candied and the potatoes are brown.
The New York Amsterdam News, August 13, 1930
