“Oh, I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck…” —“Guys and Dolls,” circa 1950
I found myself humming the above song as I was reaching for the perfect sweet potatoes for my Thanksgiving dinner. Without these potatoes on my dinner table, I would be breaking our family’s traditional dinner menu.
Sweet potato casserole is my favorite of all holiday side dishes. Aunt’s recipe contained no marshmallows. Instead, pecan halves and pineapple cubes were tucked in between the thickly sliced cubes of potatoes. Melted butter with brown sugar was added, and when no one was looking, a tablespoonful or two of brandy was sprinkled over the top.
In the 1940s, the storage room in uncle and aunt’s boarding house was filled with not pounds of, but bushels and pecks and half peck baskets of vegetables from their garden, harvested before the winter weather set in, in the small town of Aberdeen, Wash.
Round heads of cabbage and cauliflower, red beets and turnips, dried onions, potatoes both red and white and the tiny fingerlings filled the bushel baskets, and the half pecks held dried navy, kidney and a special variety of bean that aunt preferred, a cranberry bean. Aunt’s mother had brought the cranberry beans from the Appalachian Mountains with them when the family crossed the country in 1911 and each family member over the next 60-plus years, grew them in their gardens. Today, here in California, the pinto bean seems to have replaced the red-speckled cranberry variety.
Each year as Thanksgiving drew near, uncle and aunt would make a special trip to the local “feed” store where sweet potatoes were available, having been brought in from the hot valley of Yakama. Two varieties were available; yams, the orange-colored ones, and the cream-colored ones that aunt swore were the “true” sweet potatoes that she used for her holiday casserole.
In the spring, along with tomato starts and seed packets, the feed store held live baby chicks, baby turkeys with their spindly long legs and baby ducks who were my favorite. In the summer months, wood flats held fresh blackberries, raspberries and logan berries, while during the winter months, farmers would bring in bushel baskets filled to their brim with produce from their farms to be picked up by large trucks and transported to the larger cities of Olympia, Tacoma, Seattle and beyond. The feed store was my all-time favorite place to visit.
Once home, aunt would sort through the peck-full of sweet potatoes for the one potato with the most “eyes,” as aunt had a special place for that potato, while uncle would place a tall ladder outside under the window above the kitchen sink and give that window it’s yearly wash, letting in as much of the winter’s sun as possible.
Aunt would half-fill a mason glass canning jar with water, add the potato suspended by toothpicks, and place it on the kitchen windowsill, where the potato would spend its next few months, sending out trails of beautiful yellow green stems and leaves, filling that sunny window with promises of spring to come.
Aunt’s kitchen was a “working” kitchen, with no room for “fancy” things. Alongside the wood stove sat a pile of wood on a gunnysack and on the other side, a chair for “granny” to sit on when she visited. The window side had a 10-foot counter that held the KitchenAid mix master, overhead cabinets for dishes and on the opposite side sat the kitchen table, one of its sides pushed against the wall. That table was the workplace for mixing cakes, pies and cookies, and when Uncle Charlie came to visit, that table held all the paraphernalia for making “flies” for his flyfishing trips.
Aunt’s kitchen had a sound and smell of its own. The clank of the round iron plate as it was lifted to add more wood to the fire, the smell of the sauerkraut fermenting in its 15-gallon crockpot sitting next to the stove, and in its sweet potato vine-covered window, the promise of spring, yet to come.
Aunt Betty’s Sweet Potato Casserole
Serves 8-10
Butter a 9”x12” casserole dish and set aside.
In a large pot add 3-4 white variety (not yams) of 6-7 inch sweet potatoes and cover with 2 inches of cold water. Bring to a boil and cook about 20 minutes until potatoes are still firm but NOT fork-tender. Drain and cool. Peel and cut into 2-inch slices. Reserve.
In a bowl set aside:
1/2 cup Pecan halves
1/4 cup Pineapple chunks
In a saucepot add:
6 Tbsp. butter
1/3 cup of brown sugar
1 Tbsp. white Karo syrup
1 Tbsp. grated orange zest
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 pinch nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. black pepper
Heat in saucepan until ingredients are smooth and melted.
In the buttered casserole dish arrange parboiled sweet potato slices with a pecan half and a pineapple chunk in between each slice. Pour sugar/butter mixture over top, cover with foil and bake 1/2 hour in a 350deg. preheated oven. Remove foil and bake an additional 20 minutes.
Note: Karo prevents the sugar mixture from becoming grainy in texture. This casserole can be parboiled, assembled ahead and frozen prior to baking. Simply defrost and follow baking instructions. If you wish to start a sweet potato vine, you must purchase from a farmers market where they have not been sprayed to prevent sprouting.
Colly Gruczelak, a Ben Lomond resident, loves people and loves to cook. Contact her at cz****@*****st.net.
