Ammi Midstokke: The truth about sweet potatoes
The problem with holiday traditions is they happen every year.
Because they are tradition and we as Americans understand that redundancy, inefficacy and obsoleteness should be no inhibition to doing things they way they’ve always been done.
Be it one’s morning routine, choosing a side, or a sanctified commitment to sweet potato casserole on Thanksgiving, change is the unthinkable impetus to inevitable doom, holiday apocalypse, or in the very least, the disintegration of a certain member of the family’s identity. Which is why I never told my husband that I don’t like sweet potato casserole.
He makes it every year. I believe I have caught him fondling garlic bulbs as early as October in anticipation of the entire bulb he’ll use, along with a pound or so of Amish butter. The latter I have assumed because the potatoes stiffen to the consistency of pie crust dough as they age in the fridge for the two weeks subsequent to Thanksgiving. Because I’m not the only one who does not like them.
In 1917, the company, Angelus Marshmallows, lobbied to create recipes involving marshmallows to increase their consumption. A collaboration with a cooking magazine and a chef birthed the well-known version of this casserole and for reasons beyond my understanding, no one rioted.
There are a few things on a list I call “If I had a time machine.” Interrupting the creation of that recipe is just below stopping various other global calamities and just above getting Hemingway checked into rehab.
Not surprisingly, the invention of Jell-O is on the same list, but mostly because my grandmother once made a casserole of all green things including lime Jell-O, broccoli and peas. I have a suppressed traumatic memory of a similar incident involving canned salmon. Marshmallows may also have been present.
In my husband’s defense, and to his claimed pride and Southern social liability, his recipe does not use marshmallows. If any lobbying was done in its creation, it was by pharmaceutical companies producing statins. Or the Amish.
Charlie is from Missouri, so we should take a moment to honor the courage and determination, and the risk of being ostracized from family and community for taking this brave culinary step. I believe it plays no small part in the fact that his family has never come to Thanksgiving at our house. We would have to lie and tell them marshmallows are illegal in Idaho for their association with queer literature and reproductive rights.
By mid-November, Charlie is planning a trip to Costco to purchase a quantity of sweet potatoes generally reserved for disaster aid trucks. These are brought, presumably by wheelbarrow, into our kitchen, where a cooking of the potatoes takes place. I’ve not witnessed this part of the process for a number of reasons, mainly because the look of shock and horror on my face when Charlie is in the kitchen has been discouraged by our therapist. She says to approach things with curiosity.
Which is exactly what I did when I saw Charlie curiously mashing the potatoes with my pastry cutter. It now looks rather like a French chef’s patisserie tool lost a fight somewhere in South Bronx making baleadas.
“What’s this?” he said, pulling a potato masher out of his stocking that Christmas.
I wanted to tell him that it was a more industrial potato masher, seeing as our other one was a bit flimsy. Or perhaps a pie crust flattener. But in the interest of honesty in my marriage and because the packaging was still on it, I told him the truth.
The acquisition of a new potato masher only further enabled the continuation of the casseroles. Something had to be done.
Thus, while planning Thanksgiving this year, I took a leap of matrimonial faith and told him another truth as delicately as I could: We don’t really like sweet potato casserole. In fact, the kids (who are cowards and are leaving me out to dry on this one) don’t really like sweet potatoes much at all, preferring an Idaho russet in the form of French and fried.
The revelation was followed by a long silence during which I could only assume my husband was trying to figure out how many years he’d been making this casserole or how many calories of it he’s single-handedly consumed.
“But,” he stammered, blue eyes brimming with moisture, “I make it every year. It’s … tradition.” He said it with the gravity of understanding that altering tradition is basically like mucking about with the time-continuum of the universe, like I was about to suggest we leap into a black hole vortex of holiday chaos where we might eat the Easter Bunny on the Independence Day which is now in September.
I imagined his identity trying to find itself in this new future of sweet-potato-lessness. If he wasn’t the casserole guy, did he even belong? If we don’t have sweet potatoes, is it even Thanksgiving?
Friends, while I have much to give thanks for this year, today I’ll be most grateful for my husband’s capacity to recover and compromise. After a moment of contemplating the veracity of his existence, the flicker in his eyes returned, a romantic sigh escaped his lips. He was no doubt thinking about that fantastic masher and the waft of garlic emanating from our dermal layers for days.
“I guess I’ll just make it for the guys,” he said.
And with that, I hope, a new tradition was born.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.