Enduring Mysteries

Saucy, Why put marshmallows on sweet potatoes, aren’t the potatoes sweet enough. Stay Puff

In addition to marshmallows, most recipes call for brown sugar or molasses too, it is sweet on sweet on sweet. Preparing a good dish is like a musical composition, you need at the very least counterbalance and melody – it all can’t just be top notes and a catchy chorus – Candied Yams, as the recipe is called, even though the dish uses sweet potatoes, is the culinary equivalent of Celine Dion singing Mother’s Day Cards, sickening sweet.

While figuring out how marshmallows ended up on top of sweet potatoes is a mystery, sweetening root vegetables like sweet potatoes/yams, rutabagas, parsnips, carrots and turnips has long been a tradition in New England and Appalachian cookery. Before fresh produce was available year-around, vegetables were prized for their keeping powers. A veg would be selected for the attributes that would help it ‘winter’ in a root cellar, thick-skinned and starchy would have won out over sweet and fragile - sugar and molasses were added during the cooking process to liven up the taste of these stored vegetables.

Marshmallows are old and unlike most of the pilgrims they are not English, rather a French confection made with the juice of the marsh mallow. The plant, commonly used in Europe since the middle ages was prized for the thickening powder of its root. Today gelatin, gum arabic and corn syrup provide most of the structure for the puffy white candy but originally, pate de guimauve, used the viscous juice from the marsh mallow plant to bind sugar and egg whites together. The mixture was then baked and cut into square or round shapes, but probably not mini sized.

Many cookbooks are willing to state candied yams with marshmallow topping is a Thanksgiving classic, none really are willing to go on record with where or when this tradition started. The Saucytorium contains volumes on the history of food in the Americas, dozens of books about food in the US and none hint at how, when, where and why the marshmallow tradition got started. USDA's National Agriculture Library has scientific studies on the elasticity of marshmallows but nothing on how they got to the top of sweet potatoes. Gastronomica - the Journal of Food and Culture; archives contain an article on the Death of Soul Food but nothing on the birth of marshmallow ladened candied yams.

Pumpkins, not sweet potatoes would have been familiar around Plymouth Rock, Virginians might have seen a little more of the tuber, although its peak production years were the decades before and after the Great Depression, not at the beginning of the Old Dominion. While sweet pies of any variety would have been familiar to English settlers in both northern and southern colonies, there isn’t a tradition of dolloping custard pies with meringue topping. Adding to the mystery of how marshmallows ended up on sweet potatoes pie, marshmallows were not mass-produced until the post war years.

If I had to guess, I would speculate recipes on the back of canned yams/sweet potatoes and the cellophane packaging of marshmallows offered recipes as a bit of marketing synergy. That reasoning does explain how marshmallows ended up in jello but it is still idle speculation, and that is the best I can do to answer your question. Editorially, though save the marshmallows for cocoa and try peel 3 pounds of sweet potatoes, cut them into 1 inch slices and bake with a cup of bourbon, a healthy pinch of salt and a stick of butter in 350 degree oven for 90 minutes or they are tender.