ISSUE 53, SWEETS & CANDIES, Part 5: Sweet Potato Candy
Sweet Potato Candy
Well before Japan’s branch of the Kit-Kat confectionary company launched its several flavors of sweet potato kit-kat bars /I’ve tried purple and yellow/ the South was all over the idea of Sweet Potato Candy. Back in the mid twentieth century B J Otillo, a candymaker in New Orleans, created three kinds—“Jelly, nougat and chocolate covered cream”. [Times Picayune Setpember fourteen nineteen fifty eight]. He had been making jellies out of dried fruit, and had the brainstorm of substituting sweet potato. Then he began making sweet potato creams. He tried for some years to get picked up by a commercial candy making firm. No go.
Before Otillio southern cooks had made a kind of sweet potato fudge, mixing together two cups of sugar, two tablespoons of white syrup, and one cup of mashed sweet potatoes. A half of cup of cold water was added to the mix and it was cooked until it formed a soft ball. Then vanilla extract and a cup of pecans was added to the matrix. It was beaten, poured on a buttered planted and when cold cut into squares. [Dallas Morning News October six Nineteen Fifty]. Another closely related candy was sweet potato praline. The praline substitute a cup of light cream for the water and up the mashed potato content by a quarter of a cup. Brown sugar was used instead of granulated and added after you cooked the milk and mashed sweet potato mixture some. There is a recipe in the August Thirty One, Nineteenth Ninety One edition of the New Orleans Times Picayune. A secret of southern candy and praline makes is to add lemon or other kind of citrus juice to the mix to give it an edge.
I’ve had versions of the above mixture served to me by home cooks on two occasions in the past twenty years. The better of the two added shredded coconut, an ingredient that went surprising well with the mellow sugary yams. [Slow baking sweet potatoes in coconut milk is a traditional Hawaiian preparation. And articles about Japanese, Latin American and Hawaiian sweet potato confections appear in Louisiana and South Carolina newspapers in the twenties and thirties.]
One interesting development in attempts to create sweet potato candy in the South was the development of sweet potato syrup/molasses in the nineteen twenties. The effort to make sweet potato syrup was an expression of the effort to make syrup out of every substance in the vegetable kind the seized agronomy in the late nineteenth century. The notion of making syrup out of potato peelings was the thing that made it commercial. Once one had the syrup it seemed an invitation to make sweet potato hard candies. If you have ever seen sweet potato hard candy, write me. I don’t think it ever became anything more than a notion.