THIS IS THE week when, if you live in Upshur County and don’t like yams, it’s best to keep it secret. (For shame! And I am one of those, even though I know all about how much more nutritious they are than Irish potatoes.)
For a long lifetime I have disliked baked yams, which many relish, but I have learned there are many ways to spice them up — or, sugar them up.
Yam pie is the most obvious example, but there are many other recipes available. In my collection I have Let’s Cook with Yams!, the excellent Upshur County Extension Homemakers booklet that was recently reprinted by Historic Upshur Museum and is on sale there for a bargain $5.
The Cook’s Guide to Texas Sweet Potatoes, put out by the Texas Sweet Potato Council and the Texas Department of Agriculture, is another small treasure, with recipes for main dishes using ham, chicken, sausage and pork chops; tempting vegetable recipes such as candied yams, orange-sweet potato cups and yams with marshmallows; colorful bread and delightful desserts.
ON ONE OF my frequent trips to North Carolina, where my daughter Sally lives with her husband Paul Jones and their son Tucker, I picked up a leaflet claiming that North Carolina leads all states in sweet potato production. It is said to account for 40 percent of the national supply.
Inspired by a letter-writing campaign by fourth-graders in Wilson, N. C., state legislators declared the SweetPotato (spelled as one word) the official vegetable in 1995.
As to the eccentric spelling, the leaflet says “This is to avoid confusing them with potatoes.”
IT GOES ON to note that the most common inside color is a vivid orange, and “These are sometimes called ‘yams.’ However, a yam you buy in the store, is actually a SweetPotato. A true yam is a starchy tuber that grows in south america and the Caribbean. It is rough and scaly and not even related to the SweetPotato.”
This publication of the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission claims that the vegetables have been around since prehistoric times, and some scientists believe that dinosaurs might have eaten them.
Native Americans were growing them when Columbus arrive in 1492 ahd the ship’s log indicated he took some back to Europe with him. George Washington grew them.
THE NOVEMBER, 1936 edition of the Tuskegee Institute Bulletin, which came to my hand I know not when, was written by the famous George Washington Carver, then director of the Institute’s Experiment Station.
Dr. Carver was berated by later generations of more militant black leaders as too timid in terms of race relations — a veritable “Uncle Tom.” This has always seemed unfair, for he was principally a scientist.
The revised fourth edition of this bulletin, dated 1937, was titled How the Farmer Can Save His Sweet Potatoes — And Ways of Preparing Them for the Table.
DR. CARVER wrote that “the splendid service [the sweet potato] rendered during the great World War in the saving of wheat flour, will not soon be forgotten. The 118 different and attractive products (to date) made from it, are sufficient to convince the most skeptical that we are just beginning to discover the real value and marvelous possibilties of this splendid vegetable.”
Of the 11 yam varieties on his list, he recommended the Porto Rico, Dooley, Triumph, Pumpkin and Nancy Hall Yams for eating.
In addition to directions for growing and curing yams, Dr. Carver includes a recipe book, writing: “There is an idea prevalent that anybody can cook sweet potatoes. This is a very great mistake, and the many, many dishes of illy cooked potatoes that are placed before me as I travel over the South prompt me to believe that these recipes will be of value . . . “
HOW TIMES HAVE changed, agricuture-wise, since the early days of the Yamboree. Our files contain a Dallas Morning News story pubished on Oct. 28, 1940, by Ag Editor Victor Scholffelmayer, who visited Gilmer.
“Old Mother Nature and science, working together, are putting a lot of new wealth into the pockets of East Texas sandy land farmers from this season’s crop of sweet potatoes,” the story began.
During the Yamboree, it went on, growers told of a record crop bringing in probably $2 milliion to the yam belt — new wealth, at a time when cotton prices were disappointing.
THE STORY was illustrated with a scene of workers at J. R Penn’s Gilmer packing plant getting yams ready for market.
July rains made more oversized yams than the market could take, and the editor bemoaned the fact that probably one million of the three million-bushel crop would either harmfully compete with higher quality yams in the market, or go to waste. Yam growers needed other channels, such as a dehydration plant, to process these culls into other products, the ag editor wrote.
A couple of Dallas promoters made an effort to get a dehydration plant started here during World War II, but it never quite got off the ground.
Today the Yantis-Golden area is the East Texas center of yam production, and it has been years since the Extension Service had an experiment station (on the present location of the Gilmer airport) to advise farmers. Our Yamboree thrives anyway, and gives us plenty excuse to wear the orange proudly — and not just to Buckeye football games.
sgreene@tatertv.com