{"id":17976,"date":"2014-10-30T15:53:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-30T20:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=17976"},"modified":"2015-11-11T02:06:48","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T07:06:48","slug":"sweet-potatoes-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/sweet-potatoes-a-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Sweet Potatoes: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JesseYancyColumnHeader\"<\/a>Like many towns in the upland South, Vardaman grew up around a timber railhead. Some of the lordliest white oaks that ever left the continent descended from the hills above Vardaman and were shipped across the Atlantic to construct the great barrels that held the finest wines of the 1925 Exposition of Paris. But after the lumber was gone, farmers in the area turned to the sweet potato and their intuitions were crowned with success. Vardaman is now the (admittedly self-proclaimed) Sweet Potato Capital of the World.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"april<\/a>The distaff side of my family is from Vardaman, and I\u2019ve been eating sweet potatoes my whole life, so for a long time I\u2019ve been sailing along considering myself of an expert on the subject. Then here comes this McGreger girl who blows my dinghy out of the water. April McGreger has chops; whereas my father was a lawyer from Sarepta (sue me), she is a sweet potato farmer\u2019s daughter from Vardaman proper. In her introduction to Sweet Potatoes<\/em>, the tenth installment in the University of North Carolina Press\u2019 \u201cSavor the South\u201d series, McGreger says, \u201cBy the time I was a teenager, I had worked at pulling slips, the shoots that densely bedded \u2018seed\u2019 sweet potatoes send up, and had spent a couple of summers riding the \u2018setter\u2019 that plants those sweet potato slips in expansive fields. I learned firsthand how eyes and ears and noses fill with dust from the warm, just-plowed earth and how the modern farmer\u2019s schedule is set by nature and financial demands, often at odds with each other.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"mcgreger<\/a>People, you have no idea how refreshing, how delightful it is to find a book about food written by a genuine human being who has a fundamental knowledge of \u201cfarm to table\u201d and not by one of these pompous foodways pundits who don\u2019t know a roux from a rutabaga or a kitchen flim-flam aristo whose closest connection to the earth is trying to grow weed on his daddy\u2019s back forty before flunking out of college and entering culinary school. McGreger is a very fine writer (as we expect of Mississippi\u2019s children) and a scholar to boot, so she takes an appropriately schoolmarmish tone when it comes to sweet potatoes. In her own rhetoric, she poses the question \u201cIs there any food more central to our southern identity than sweet potatoes?\u201d The short answer is no, and perhaps for that very reason the sweet potato demands definition, particularly as a botanical and linguistic entity. I\u2019ll leave that explanation to April, who does a thorough job of sorting out the Latin as well as the vernacular. She spends some time on the history of this important foodstuff, pointing out the antiquity of its use and cultivation in the New World as well as its introduction to the Old. Central to her narrative is the role of the sweet potato in the culinary history of the American South where it\u2019s been keeping body and soul together throughout the region\u2019s tumultuous history.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before getting to the recipes proper, McGreger includes a crucial section concerning the selection, storage, and preparation of sweet potatoes as well as a description of a few of the most essential culinary varieties of the sweet potato (some have been developed as a garden ornamental) and what sorts of dishes these varieties are best suited. Granted most of us only have access to the traditional \u201cmoist, orange-fleshed, and sweet\u201d varieties, but it\u2019s worth knowing other types are out there, and if the trend to greater diversity in the marketplace and the proliferation of farmers\u2019 markets continues, finding whites, yellows, purples and heirloom varieties is something to look forward to. Equally important is her section on selection and storage, since while she recommends buying sweet potatoes \u201cdirty by the bushel, directly from a farmer,\u201d the roots must be cured in a warm, humid environment for a few weeks in order to fully develop their flavor. Most essential is McGreger\u2019s advice on the preparation of sweet potatoes, and since she is clearly the final court of authority when it comes to cooking these vegetables (roots and leaves, it\u2019s worth noting), this section can well be considered the heart of her work.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"sweetpotatofestival2014\"<\/a>McGreger chafes at being restricted to only fifty recipes, but to her credit she offers a spectacular variety \u201caimed to help you develop techniques to develop your own repertoire.\u201d These are arranged in four categories: \u201cBreakfast: Morning Pastries, Grits, Gravy, and Hash\u201d; \u201cSides and Salads: Vintage Classics and Fresh, Modern Twists\u201d; \u201cMains, Soups, Stews, and In-Betweens: A World of Flavor\u201d; and \u201cDesserts: A Little Something Sweet\u201d. Early on she laments that, \u201cOnce such a prominent food in the southern diet, the sweet potato is now eaten by many only on Thanksgiving in the form of sweet potato casserole or sweet potato pie,\u201d and her selection of recipes is designed to illustrate the versatility of the sweet potato and to provide cooks at every level of proficiency with a means of making them more of a staple in the kitchen, as well they should be.<\/span><\/p>\n

April wryly regrets never winning the Little Miss Sweet Potato crown, but a lot of thought, a lot of time, and a lot of love went into this wonderful work, and in my less-than-humble opinion it establishes April McGreger as not merely a Little Miss, nor even a Queen, but as the Empress of Sweet Potatoes. \"The<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

–<\/span>
\nThis article was originally printed in The Local Voice #215 (published October 23, 2014).<\/span>
\nTo download the PDF of this issue, click here.<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like many towns in the upland South, Vardaman grew up around a timber railhead. Some of the lordliest<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":242,"featured_media":17982,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[4590,5,4588,4589,4587,4591,4340],"class_list":["post-17976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-food","tag-april-mcgreger","tag-mississippi","tag-sweet-potato","tag-sweet-potato-capitol-of-the-world","tag-sweet-potato-festival","tag-university-of-north-carolina-press","tag-vardaman"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/10\/SweetPotatoesFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}