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Whether you boil and drizzle with molasses or mash and top with marshmallows, sweet potatoes have become a staple at Thanksgiving tables.
But did you know that sweet potatoes were cultivated and consumed before the white (Irish) potato?
The earliest cultivation records of the sweet potato date to 750 BC in Peru, although archeological evidence shows cultivation of the sweet potato might have begun around 2500-1850 BC. By the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World in the late 15th century, sweet potatoes were well established as food plants in South and Central America.
Columbus brought sweet potatoes back to Spain, introducing them to the taste buds and gardens of Europe. Europeans referred to the sweet potato as the potato, which often leads to confusion when searching for old sweet potato recipes. It wasn’t until after the 1740’s that the term sweet potato began to be used by American colonists to distinguish it from the white (Irish) potato.
England’s John Gerard wrote about the potato (sweet potato) in his 1597 Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. Along with a description of the plant, he also describes how it is eaten- roasted and infused with wine, boiled with prunes, or roasted with oil, vinegar, and salt. He also suggests that the sweet potato “comforts, strengthens, and nourishes the body,” as well as “procuring bodily lust.”
This aphrodisiac quality could be the reason for its popularity in the upper classes of 16th century England. It is suggested that Henry VIII consumed massive amounts of sweet potatoes, especially spiced sweet potato pie and Shakespeare’s Falstaff exclaims in the Merry of Wives of Windsor (1602): “Let the sky rain potatoes. Let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves,’ hail kissing-comfits and snow eryngoes!” A recipe in Thomas Dawson’s Book of Cookerie (1620, 1629) includes “A tarte to cause courage either in a man or woman” that uses potato [sweet potato].
But what about the candied sweet potato (aka candied yams)?
Without a doubt, by 1880 Americans were enjoying some sort of variation of candied sweet potatoes. American cookbooks, such as the widely published 1893 Boston Cooking School Cookbook by Fannie Farmer featured a recipe for glazed sweet potatoes. Likewise, in 1896 Texas Farm and Ranch published Sweet Potato Culture for Profit: A Full Account of the Origin,History and Botanical Characteristics of Sweet Potato , which included a recipe for glazed sweet potatoes.
Around the same time, George Washington Carver compiled more than a hundred recipes for the vegetable. Carver’s recipes no. 9 and 10 discuss two different ways to make glacé sweet potatoes (glacé often refers to something that is sugared or candied). By the 1910’s candied sweet potato recipes were wide-ranging in the United States, appearing in Martha McCulloch-Williams 1919 Dishes from the Old South and Florence Greenbaum’s 1919 International Jewish Cookbook.
What about the marshmallows?
Early sweet potato pudding recipes, such as the one found in the first American cookbook,American Cookery (1796) by Amelia Simmons features a recipe for potato pudding* that is similar to our contemporary recipe for candied sweet potato with marshmallows. It includes mashed sweet potatoes, milk, nutmeg, and egg whites. Eliza Leslie’s 1840 Directions for Cookery also gives instructions for a sweet potato pudding, calling for mashed sweet potatoes and milk, topped with egg whites, and baked in the oven.
One of the earliest published recipes that uses marshmallows was in a 1919 booklet from the Barrett Company on Sweet Potato and Yams, which suggests adding marshmallows to candied yams. In 1917, the marketers of Angelus Marshmallows hired Janet McKenzie Hill, founder of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, to develop recipes for a booklet designed to encourage home cooks to embrace the candy as an everyday ingredient.” This booklet contained “the first documented appearance of mashed sweet potatoes baked with a marshmallow topping.”) A decade later, Ida C. Bailey Allen’s Vital Vegetables (1928) gives readers a browned sweet potatoes with marshmallows recipe.
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