A Sweet Potato Stole My Bible

     Under my kitchen counter, one entire cabinet is full of sweet potatoes.  We had a bumper crop this year.  We have had them mashed, baked, roasted and in salads and stews.  As I write it is early January and it looks as if our supply will carry us well into the summer.  Sweet potatoes are a nutritious and durable food and in many countries worldwide the chief staple of life.  The only problem with them is, in fact:
     I hate them. 
     This is a column I wrote last year, the first year I tried sweet potatoes.  After a lifetime of enmity between me and the Orange One, we had a brief rapprochement when I tasted some grown by my neighbor Jim.  I didn't precisely like them but I was impressed with how easily they grew.  So:  I grew some.  
     Will somebody please tell me what I'm supposed to do with them now?  
     I mean, imagine if there was somebody you absolutely couldn't stand your entire life, then you decided to give that person a chance so you invited him or her over to your house, and then he or she took over an entire cabinet under your kitchen counter and didn't leave for 10 or 11 months.  
     I foresee another Bob's Little Acre about sweet potatoes later this year.  Meanwhile here is the old one.  If you get tired of it plain try it mashed, baked, roasted or in salads and stews.

A SWEET POTATO STOLE MY BIBLE

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This year, I will grow sweet potatoes in my garden.

            What?  No lightning bolt?  No gasps of astonishment and disbelief?  This is banner-headline, stop-the-presses stuff, the horticultural equivalent of PEACE BREAKS OUT IN MIDDLE EAST or GOVERNOR PERDUE DECLARES INTENTION TO LIVE REST OF LIFE AS WOMAN.

            Sweet potatoes, you see, are my ancestral enemy.  They have persecuted my people through countless millennia.  In the Old Country, sweet potatoes hunted us with dogs and burned our villages.  Finally my ancestors fled Europe, clutching their grandmothers’ silver candlesticks, mere steps ahead of marauding sweet potato armies.  That is how we ended up in America. 

            Where we found the woods stiff with yet more sweet potatoes, and these were even deadlier.  These came with miniature marshmallows.

            My ancestors and sweet potatoes fought on different sides of the Civil War, and there is a story in my family that my great-great-grandmother, chancing to encounter General Meade on the way to the beer store, suggested, “Why don’t you burn out that nest of sweet potatoes at Gettysburg?”

            The feud persisted into modernity.  Sweet potatoes used to beat me up in junior high school, and one of them murdered my uncle, shot my dog and stole my Bible.

            All right, all right.  I’ve gotten carried away.  Actually, though it seems like longer, my war with sweet potatoes started in 1963, when my brother Frank was 4.   

Institutions did the most remarkable things to children in those pre-lawsuit days.  Then, as now, people simpered piously about children being special, magical, and the future; but just below the syrupy surface lay a lingering spare-the-rod ethos that would leap out at you like a barracuda if you made it mad.  Our generation was paddled routinely for sass, for forgotten homework, for daydreaming.  I got it once for staring out the doorway at the spring.  If that remained an infraction into adulthood I would be a hardened con by now, with tattoos and a girlfriend named Butch.

In any case, baby Frank wouldn’t eat the sweet potato casserole served at his nursery school, so some sweet-looking old lady of the spare-the-rod persuasion held him down and crammed it down his throat.  His gorge rose up at this tyranny, and so did the sweet potatoes.  Which would have been fine if he’d aimed at the perpetrator but my brother’s timing was always a little off – in later life he would cheat on his prospective rich wife before she’d married him, earning him the boot instead of a fat divorce settlement.  In this instance his reaction was delayed rather than premature, and he waited to spew until he was in the back seat of our car, beside your narrator.

Vomit is bad enough.  But this was orange vomit, with marshmallows.

So I grew up with a hatred of sweet potatoes, an antipathy heightened by the truly obscene preparation traditional for this vegetable in American cookery.  Nobody puts chocolate syrup on broccoli.  Nobody smothers turnips in whipped cream.  Why, then, goo up the sweet potato with brown sugar, nuts and marshmallows, as if in some grotesque pretense it is a hot fudge sundae, only orange?  It is not just unappetizing, it is pornographic.  To vomit it is redundant.

Among my own family, avoiding sweet potatoes was never difficult – it wasn’t just me in the back seat of that Dodge – but Thanksgiving dinner with the in-laws was more problematic.  The big-haired Baptist ladies who presided at these functions never could take no thank you for an answer, so that sometimes the only way to escape the table marshmallow-free was to set somebody on fire.

I did what I had to do.  Better jail time than sweet potatoes.  Better death.

            That all changed last year.  A neighbor grew sweet potatoes and somehow four of them made their way over here, possibly through the pet door.  They were always sneaky.  I watched them suspiciously for several weeks as they lay, vaguely malevolent, on the counter; then, not in any spirit of truce, but as a result of intense pressure from a segment of the domestic population to whom big-haired Baptists bearing marshmallows bore no terrors, I baked them. 

After that, it seemed cowardly not to taste them, so, fork trembling, knuckles white, I cut into one, lifted the steaming orange pulp of my ancient enemy to my bloodless lips, and found to my astonishment that, without the marshmallows, minus the sugary pools of gop, the sweet potato is –

Largely inoffensive.

            What, after decades of enmity you were expecting maybe love songs?  But I am prepared to admit they are vaguely edible.  Hey, it’s a start.

Anyway, last year my horticultural efforts were focused mostly on flowers.  Other years my gardens have centered around hot peppers or herbs.  This year, the theme I have chosen is:  subsistence.  These are hard times, and sometimes I worry we’ll all end up crawling around looking under rocks for grubs.  So I’m planting stick-to-your-ribs food crops to forestall the evil day.

And sweet potatoes, I have read, feed most of the world.  Grown in the Americas for 5000 years, ipomoea batatas quickly spread to Asia, Africa and the Pacific, where they are now staples.  They are reliable and easy to grow, with vining foliage that chokes out weeds.  They are filling and chock-full of vitamins, and internationally they are prepared in any number of fascinating ways, none of which involves miniature marshmallows.

So I’ll give sweet potatoes a few square feet of garden space this year.  They can’t taste any worse than grubs, right?  I’ve made peace with my ancient enemy at last!  

And if they don’t work out, what the heck, I can always torch their huts, shoot their headsmen, and enslave their children.   

END

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.