Reconstructing A Sweet Potatoe Recipe
Dec. 12th, 2020 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
raven_cromwellMusings that somehow start with a recipe and grief and then turn sharply into politics, immigration, and colonialism beneath the Some people have cookies or brownies; for my Mom and I, it was sweet potato casserole and chili. Those annual things that only your Mom can make, and deviation is anathema.
If I'm glad of anything with Mom's passing, it's that it was quick, for her sake. But a swift, unplanned departure leaves, in so many ways, an even more gaping void than a slow decline, because there's no time to gather all those bits of cultural heritage that, for me at least, far outstrip in value any single material possession she left.
Worst of all, there was no writing down of the beloved sweet potato or chili recipes, though I have some small hope that successfully reconstructing the potato recipe means it's possible I can find some archival record somewhere of some family that makes similar chili--I remember we used spaghetti, which always set us apart, and...Bush's Chili beans, though I'm sketchier on that last.
Anyhow, am traveling for Christmas, and got absolutely obsessed with the idea of recreating the potatoes at friends' Christmas, especially after having other folks' thanksgiving offerings. They were fine, honestly, and I'm deeply. deeply moved by the kindness of recently-acquired family in welcoming me in to their Thanksgiving. But damn it all, they weren't *my* sweet potatoes, and the fact that they were sorta close by having marshmallows on top just made the contrast of what they weren't sharply viscerally painful.
Mom has cookbooks--she treated acquiring them like a competition, where quantity and quality were both crucial. So many cookbooks, in fact, that finding the recipe I want is like fruitlessly side-line directing someone else to find a needle in a haystack. Stepdad, to his eternal credit, tried! But it's tedious work, looking for unfamiliar stuff, and he freely admits he probably missed it.
By last night, I'd gone from obsessed to slightly manic and more than a little unreasonably panicked. I had! to have my sweet potatoes for Christmas. And thus commenced the great google search o' doom. Sweet potato casserole got me nothing. Sweet potato casserole with marshmallows merely turned up the unhelpful factoid that Southern recipes mentioning yams didn't actually mean yams, with an admittedly really interesting digression into how yams are actually a tougher tuber grown in Africa.
It was now3 A.M. easy. I'd gone through at least thirty perfectly fine sweet potato recipes, and was starting to make very impossible threats against my inanimate PC and try desperately to keep crying myself sick below the radar enough that I didn't wake stepdad, because I really didn't wanna explain that I thought I'd permanently lost one of my two family recipes to a guy who thinks the height of cooking is the spaghetti he recently mastered.
Finally, I got enough breath and sense from somewhere to remember that Google is, at its core, an algorithm. The more words I gave the algorithm, the more likely I was to get something somewhat close. So I typed in: sweet potatoes, pecans, vanilla, brown and white sugar, marshmallows.
And finally! I started to get somewhere. I think it was the brown sugar that finally unlocked it, because it's the critical ingredient in the streusel topping. It still took perusing another five or ten hits, but I finally learned that my beloved yams recipe was actually taken from the famous Ruth Chris steakhouse--I'll be damned! didn't realize I was eating fancy rich people gourmet food all these years I now wanna dress for Christmas dinner in pearls.
That first recipe didn't include the marshmallows I was used to, but now I had! the critical word I'd been missing: streusel. I'd known that our topping was rare in comparison to other sweet potatoes, but hadn't ever known its fancier name. Once I could feed google the fancy word, other variations started appearing. Still had to do some conversions: I'm accustomed to making the recipe with a can of sweet potatoes, and all the proper and correct versions want actual whole potatoes which you cook and then mash, so needed to figure just how large a can I'd need. But google is better at mathematical conversions than it is at plucking one recipe out of millions, and after finding the base ingredient list, I could sleep, so this afternoon's conversion labors felt like the home stretch.
I'm thinking about so many things right now: barriers to finding the simplest thing when you don't have the proper word for it in a context where proper language is crucial, especially. Making me think a lot about ESL and have a kind of empathy with those struggles I'd never had before; needing to access an unfamiliar tier of my own language really grants a new perspective on the mammoth complexity of English, and how alienating it must be to have no guides; I certainly felt entirely adrift, knowing that the one person who could've easily solved the conundrum for me would never be solving conundrums again, and I have such a newfound awe and appreciation for the folks who come here, knowing! they'll have these same kinds of struggles a hundred times a day, often with just as little help, and do it anyway. It's an oft-repeated fact in immigrant rites' circles that people wouldn't be coming here, on these arduous, often deadly journeys, if they didn't need to. And just, feeling this adrift, in a world I know relatively well, that hour of utter flailing and frustration, just powerfully reinforced for me the barriers immigrants climb, even after journeys that would test the will of anyone.
And, I'm thinking of culture and the ways we can perpetuate and reclaim it. Fragmentarily, maybe. But it's deeply hopeful to me that: even if these aren't the precise proportions of Mom's recipe, even if I'll never, perhaps, have those proportions, it's something very. very close. Constructed of so many memories of hours watching her work, and my determination to fall back on those memories when she was no longer here. That, I don't even entirely know, I have that reservoir, and that while it won't be getting any fuller, it's serving me well all the same. And that gives me such empathy for the robbery that is cultural erasure, because the devastation of thinking I'd lost one recipe left me utterly unmoored, and to try and multiply that by an entire culture, to try and contemplate the crimes colonialism and neocolonialism perpetrate?; it's a grief that would swallow you alive.
Because I want to perpetuate my own little piece of culture, here's the vaunted sweet potato recipe, for anyone wanting something new for the holiday repertoire.
Ingredients:
For the Mashed Sweet Potatoes:
1. can of Bruce's cut sweet potatoes in light syrup (you're looking for the 40 oz because the only way I know how to make this is big and have no idea what it'd do to try and cut the recipe down.)
2. 1/2 cup granulated sugar
3. 1 tsp Kosher salt
4. 1 tsp vanilla extract
5. 2 large eggs
6. 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
For the Streusel topping:
1. 1 cup light brown sugar, packed
2. 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
3. 1 cup pecan pieces
4. 1 cup marshmallows
5. 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted.
Prep:
1. Drain off the syrup in the canned potatoes.
2. Preheat oven to 375 and spray a 2 quart dish.
3. In a large bowl, combine potatoes with all your ingredients under the potatoes category. Beat with a mixer until light and fluffy, four-five minutes; we definitely made sure they were mashed rather than chunky.
4. Pour into 2 quart dish and bake for 25 minutes.
5. While that's baking, combine all your streusel ingredients in a small bowl, beat with a fork, and set aside.
6. Sprinkle the sweet potatoes with streusel after their 25 minutes are over. Return to oven for 10-15 minutes until crumble is lightly brown and the marshmallows are all nice and melted.
If I'm glad of anything with Mom's passing, it's that it was quick, for her sake. But a swift, unplanned departure leaves, in so many ways, an even more gaping void than a slow decline, because there's no time to gather all those bits of cultural heritage that, for me at least, far outstrip in value any single material possession she left.
Worst of all, there was no writing down of the beloved sweet potato or chili recipes, though I have some small hope that successfully reconstructing the potato recipe means it's possible I can find some archival record somewhere of some family that makes similar chili--I remember we used spaghetti, which always set us apart, and...Bush's Chili beans, though I'm sketchier on that last.
Anyhow, am traveling for Christmas, and got absolutely obsessed with the idea of recreating the potatoes at friends' Christmas, especially after having other folks' thanksgiving offerings. They were fine, honestly, and I'm deeply. deeply moved by the kindness of recently-acquired family in welcoming me in to their Thanksgiving. But damn it all, they weren't *my* sweet potatoes, and the fact that they were sorta close by having marshmallows on top just made the contrast of what they weren't sharply viscerally painful.
Mom has cookbooks--she treated acquiring them like a competition, where quantity and quality were both crucial. So many cookbooks, in fact, that finding the recipe I want is like fruitlessly side-line directing someone else to find a needle in a haystack. Stepdad, to his eternal credit, tried! But it's tedious work, looking for unfamiliar stuff, and he freely admits he probably missed it.
By last night, I'd gone from obsessed to slightly manic and more than a little unreasonably panicked. I had! to have my sweet potatoes for Christmas. And thus commenced the great google search o' doom. Sweet potato casserole got me nothing. Sweet potato casserole with marshmallows merely turned up the unhelpful factoid that Southern recipes mentioning yams didn't actually mean yams, with an admittedly really interesting digression into how yams are actually a tougher tuber grown in Africa.
It was now3 A.M. easy. I'd gone through at least thirty perfectly fine sweet potato recipes, and was starting to make very impossible threats against my inanimate PC and try desperately to keep crying myself sick below the radar enough that I didn't wake stepdad, because I really didn't wanna explain that I thought I'd permanently lost one of my two family recipes to a guy who thinks the height of cooking is the spaghetti he recently mastered.
Finally, I got enough breath and sense from somewhere to remember that Google is, at its core, an algorithm. The more words I gave the algorithm, the more likely I was to get something somewhat close. So I typed in: sweet potatoes, pecans, vanilla, brown and white sugar, marshmallows.
And finally! I started to get somewhere. I think it was the brown sugar that finally unlocked it, because it's the critical ingredient in the streusel topping. It still took perusing another five or ten hits, but I finally learned that my beloved yams recipe was actually taken from the famous Ruth Chris steakhouse--I'll be damned! didn't realize I was eating fancy rich people gourmet food all these years I now wanna dress for Christmas dinner in pearls.
That first recipe didn't include the marshmallows I was used to, but now I had! the critical word I'd been missing: streusel. I'd known that our topping was rare in comparison to other sweet potatoes, but hadn't ever known its fancier name. Once I could feed google the fancy word, other variations started appearing. Still had to do some conversions: I'm accustomed to making the recipe with a can of sweet potatoes, and all the proper and correct versions want actual whole potatoes which you cook and then mash, so needed to figure just how large a can I'd need. But google is better at mathematical conversions than it is at plucking one recipe out of millions, and after finding the base ingredient list, I could sleep, so this afternoon's conversion labors felt like the home stretch.
I'm thinking about so many things right now: barriers to finding the simplest thing when you don't have the proper word for it in a context where proper language is crucial, especially. Making me think a lot about ESL and have a kind of empathy with those struggles I'd never had before; needing to access an unfamiliar tier of my own language really grants a new perspective on the mammoth complexity of English, and how alienating it must be to have no guides; I certainly felt entirely adrift, knowing that the one person who could've easily solved the conundrum for me would never be solving conundrums again, and I have such a newfound awe and appreciation for the folks who come here, knowing! they'll have these same kinds of struggles a hundred times a day, often with just as little help, and do it anyway. It's an oft-repeated fact in immigrant rites' circles that people wouldn't be coming here, on these arduous, often deadly journeys, if they didn't need to. And just, feeling this adrift, in a world I know relatively well, that hour of utter flailing and frustration, just powerfully reinforced for me the barriers immigrants climb, even after journeys that would test the will of anyone.
And, I'm thinking of culture and the ways we can perpetuate and reclaim it. Fragmentarily, maybe. But it's deeply hopeful to me that: even if these aren't the precise proportions of Mom's recipe, even if I'll never, perhaps, have those proportions, it's something very. very close. Constructed of so many memories of hours watching her work, and my determination to fall back on those memories when she was no longer here. That, I don't even entirely know, I have that reservoir, and that while it won't be getting any fuller, it's serving me well all the same. And that gives me such empathy for the robbery that is cultural erasure, because the devastation of thinking I'd lost one recipe left me utterly unmoored, and to try and multiply that by an entire culture, to try and contemplate the crimes colonialism and neocolonialism perpetrate?; it's a grief that would swallow you alive.
Because I want to perpetuate my own little piece of culture, here's the vaunted sweet potato recipe, for anyone wanting something new for the holiday repertoire.
Ingredients:
For the Mashed Sweet Potatoes:
1. can of Bruce's cut sweet potatoes in light syrup (you're looking for the 40 oz because the only way I know how to make this is big and have no idea what it'd do to try and cut the recipe down.)
2. 1/2 cup granulated sugar
3. 1 tsp Kosher salt
4. 1 tsp vanilla extract
5. 2 large eggs
6. 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted
For the Streusel topping:
1. 1 cup light brown sugar, packed
2. 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
3. 1 cup pecan pieces
4. 1 cup marshmallows
5. 1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted.
Prep:
1. Drain off the syrup in the canned potatoes.
2. Preheat oven to 375 and spray a 2 quart dish.
3. In a large bowl, combine potatoes with all your ingredients under the potatoes category. Beat with a mixer until light and fluffy, four-five minutes; we definitely made sure they were mashed rather than chunky.
4. Pour into 2 quart dish and bake for 25 minutes.
5. While that's baking, combine all your streusel ingredients in a small bowl, beat with a fork, and set aside.
6. Sprinkle the sweet potatoes with streusel after their 25 minutes are over. Return to oven for 10-15 minutes until crumble is lightly brown and the marshmallows are all nice and melted.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-22 08:45 pm (UTC)Maybe you'll get a kick out of this story, if a kick is welcome now. Please skip it if it isn't.
(eta: Also, I realized halfway through that there's a point where it sounds like this story is going in a cannibalistic direction. I promise it's not.)
My extended family came apart when the mine in our hometown shut down when I was a kid and my parents and uncles had to move far away to find work. This wasn't a new phenomenon. Through displacement, genocide, and unhappy immigration stories, my grandparents pretty much had to reinvent what it meant to have a family, and maybe that's why my maternal grandmother worked so hard for her kitchen table to be a place where everyone - no matter the family dysfunction - felt cared for and welcomed for a little while. Because of her own experiences with hunger and just because of who she was, it was important to my grandmother, my Mémère, that everyone be well-fed. You had to be careful ever letting Mémère know you didn't like something because she would get up from the table mid-meal and make you something else. Not in a passive-aggressive way, but out of a genuine need to feed you something you wanted to eat.
She was a wonderful cook. Her repertoire of recipes was small, owing to the time she grew up in and the limited ingredients we got up north, but every recipe stuck with me. More than that, the feeling of being at her table stuck with me, stuck with all of us, and the feeling of having started out surrounded by one culture and now not knowing how to take up the adult side of carrying it on. As a result, after Mémère passed away when me and my sister and our cousins were in our teens and early twenties, the first thing any of us did when we had our own kitchens around the holidays was try to recreate her dishes: her tourtière most of all.
Now, a tourtière is a savoury pie of seasoned ground meat in a flaky double crust, and there are as many recipes out there as there are grandmothers who made it. Books and websites are full of variations, but anything but the one you grew up with is always going to fall into the culinary uncanny valley. We knew there weren't any potatoes or vegetables in hers, so we started with the meat. Mémère's kitchen was tiny and cooking was her alone-time. If the leaf was in the table because there was going to be guests, you couldn't even really get into the kitchen from the rest of the house and had to crawl under the table or climb over the washing machine just to get to the bathroom. As a result, none of us younger folks had sussed out much about her ingredients or process by watching her cook.
Beef? There was definitely red meat in there, so we tried beef. It didn't taste right and didn't have the right texture. That was fine, Mémère made little without pork in it, so it must have been one of the varieties that included pork. We tried that in different proportions, and it was better but not entirely there. It definitely wasn't veal, Mémère wasn't paying for veal even if you could get it up north. Moose or some other bush meat? No, the taste and cut wasn't right, and when we had bush meat Mémère always made a cipaille with it instead. A tourtière was special occasion food, and she was too proud to serve game for a special occasion.
We all went ahead and spent years futzing with the seasonings. Salt and pepper, sure. Broth or just water? Cinnamon or nutmeg? Both? Definitely not cloves, or at least not as many as my sister put in that one time...
Eventually, I settled on something close enough to the seasoning, but the meat was still a mystery. I could remember the flavour and texture so well, and nothing else had ever been 100% like it. Did we just have some special kind of beef up there? There's not much in the way of farming that far north, not just because of the cold but because it sits on nothing but igneous rock. But there was a dairy in the area, so it stood to reason there was a slaughterhouse.
The question sat unresolved for a while longer until about seven years back. I was talking to my sister, a rarity, and we were making small talk about some news items of the day, including the horse meat story in Europe - the scandal over the discovery that a lot of frozen food in Europe had undeclared horse meat mixed into the beef.
"Hey," I said, "remember how we used to drive over the border and get those big packs of horse meat when we lived up north?"
She made a face. "What? No!"
This didn't entirely surprise me. My sister rarely went on long errands with my mom and me, and she's always been very sensitive about meat. She eats it, but not off the bone, and can't look at it raw. She went through a period as a kid where she wouldn't even go through the meat section at the grocery store.
"Yeah, we had to get it in Quebec, and I remember it came in these coloured styrofoam trays..."
She started to get upset. "I swear, if Mom and Dad made me eat horse meat, I'm going to—"
"No, no," I said, wanting to calm her down and also thinking I was telling the truth. "I don't even remember Mom and Dad making anything with ground meat, except for shepherd's pie sometimes, and that was just to use up moose. I actually think we used to drop it off at..."
I paused with the distinct memory of getting back late from shopping in Quebec and hanging over the edge of Mémère's chest freezer to put things away, and I thought about the tourtière and the ground meat filling that I'd somehow never tasted anywhere else since.
"What?" my sister said.
"Oh," I said. "Never mind. I'm pretty sure we gave it to Uncle Brian."