My Favorite Ladies Auxiliary Sweet Potato Recipe: Basic

WITH THE BEGINNING of the winter holiday juggernaut breathing down my neck, meaning multiple menus to plan, this is the ideal time to revisit favorite recipe sources in search of the perfect (or, sometimes, perfectly frightening?) side dishes from sisters past and present. Whether it’s creamed onions or green-bean casserole that you love (or loathe), our TSP collection of Ladies Auxiliary cookbooks has something for everyone. And let’s be honest––we all need a little humor and perspective in order to survive the next seven weeks. 

These wonderful old cookbooks, created by sisterhoods ranging from the Junior League to the Sisters of Pythia, have provided us with the ultimate potato salad, the greatest meatloaf, even multiple interpretations of tuna casserole. I couldn’t wait to see what I’d find there for the traditional Thanksgiving side-dish lineup.

I wasn’t disappointed. For Thanksgiving planning, the books’ offerings boggle the mind, but I had to start somewhere. To me, sweet potatoes or yams are a holiday challenge: Nearly everyone wants them, but coming up with a version everyone wants to eat is a different thing altogether. My go-to recipe is from a sister-friend, or, more precisely, from my sister-friend’s great aunt––how’s that for provenance? It’s slightly hokey and very retro, and also, most important, delicious. But I wondered what cooking sisterhoods around the country and through the eras might offer.

What I discovered in my ever-expanding trove of sisterly cookbooks is that America’s cooks take their sweet potatoes (and yams: the terms are mostly used interchangeably, even though the two vegetables are actually different) seriously. When it comes to sweets, save the perplexing and perennial marshmallow affectation, cooks mostly leave them unmolested, allowing their natural charms (and they are many) to shine through.

Several cookbooks, including the irresistably named Panic in the Pantry, compiled by the Junior Section of the Manor Club in Pelham, New York, offered a variation on this super-bare bones theme: apples and sweet potatoes, sliced, baked together with little or no added flavoring. It strikes me as too minimalist, but then my version includes water chestnuts, so what do I know?

I was astonished that only one cookbook, the tony Main Line Classics, featured what I think of as the classic, slightly nauseating (sorry) sweet-potato casserole topped with mini-marshmallows. Published by the members of the Wayne, Pennsylvania, Junior Saturday Club, the book is relatively recent, 1982, though the club’s history dates back to 1886. (This recipe? I’m guessing it’s more recent.)

The oddest creation I found (for the sweet potato, mind you––just wait to see the travesties unleashed on the poor cranberry in next week’s edition) was the recipe for Sweet Potato Balls from the Junior League of Greensboro, North Carolina’s Out of Our League compendium (1978.) These contained not only marshmallows and crushed corn flakes. Not for me.

The most promising, I thought, was the admirably straightforward Sweet Potato Souffle from Jan Atkins, of Christ Episcopal Church, Farmington, Connecticut. Apparently, they’re not quite as wild in Connecticut as in Pennsylvania, but that suits me just fine––I might even break with my own tradition, and try something new. How about you? Do you have an old standby, or do you experiment on the holiday? Tell us how you’ll be serving sweet potatoes this year; if you use your sister’s recipe, so much the better!

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I attribute my love of high school to three things. First, it was the only time in my life that I felt like I wasn’t a total goober for being a smart (smart-ass?) kid. At my high school, everyone was too smart for their own good, so being a little too smart no longer made me special, or especially unliked, as it had for all of junior high (the dark days, as I think of them.) Second, my school was a boarding school, which meant, as my mother liked to say, that I lived only with the one kind of people teenage me could stand: other teenagers. Third, boys in high school liked me, and oh, how I liked them. Ah, youth.

But I digress, for even though some of my reunion was spent thinking about boys turned into men (baldness is cruel, can I just say?) the best moments were all about my girls, my BFFs, with whom I had nearly three whole days of criminally luxurious hang-out time.

One highlight was Friday night, when I cooked dinner for everyone at our friend Barb’s house. Barb lives about 20 minutes from our old school, so we were able to gather at her table, drink wine and relish each other’s company–without husbands or children–for hours. Bliss.

I had to make something simple, healthy, and able to accommodate an astonishing range of mid-life dietary requirements: no wheat or gluten (me); no red meat (sweet Katherine); no dairy or shellfish (darling Dara Kaye). I settled on a simple roast chicken, butterflied to save cooking time, and a salad of buckwheat kasha, roasted asparagus, walnuts, olives and fresh herbs. It was good enough that everyone wanted the recipes, so I thought I’d share them with you, too.

This is a simple, super-nutritious dinner that comes together quickly; most of the time you’re just waiting for the chicken, which means you can sit down at your dear friend’s kitchen table with a glass of wine, and laugh, cry, and laugh some more.

Butterflied Roast Chicken

Don’t be intimidated by butterflying–using a sharp chef’s knife or poultry shears, it’s a cinch. All you do is cut the backbone out of the chicken, starting at the tail, cutting a straight line on either side of it all the way up to the top of the back. Then you turn the chicken breast side up, press down on the breastbone to break it and flatten the bird out further.

I like to tuck the wing tips under the sides of the chicken so they don’t burn, and cut little slits in the skin below the breast to tuck the tips of the drumsticks into to hold them in place. (You have to rotate the legs so that the bony bottom end of the drumstick points in toward the center of the bird’s breast.) The result is a slightly-more-elegant, faster-cooking presentation.  You can see a video of the process here.

Ingredients

1 chicken, around 4 lbs.
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (or less, to taste)
coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
1 lemon, cut into 1/4 inch slices
fresh herbs (optional)–I like thyme, rosemary and parsley
6 cloves garlic, unpeeled

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Butterfly the chicken and pat dry with paper towels. Rub the breast side with a bit of olive oil and sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. Place the bird breast side up in a cast iron frying pan. Slip your fingers under the skin on the breast and thigh, creating a little pocket. Slip in a couple of sprigs of your herbs. Tuck the lemon slices around the bird. Scatter a few herb sprigs and garlic cloves around the bird.

Roast the bird breast side up for 30 minutes. Remove from oven, turn the bird over, and roast breast side down for another 30 minutes. Remove from oven, turn breast side up, and cover the pan with a lid or aluminum foil and let the bird rest for 15 minutes before carving and serving. You can give each portion a piece of roasted lemon and garlic for both garnish and for flavor–both are delicious squeezed over the meat.

Kasha and Asparagus Salad

2 cups kasha (buckwheat)
4 cups chicken stock (water or vegetable stock is fine)
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 bunch asparagus, tough ends trimmed
1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped and toasted in a sauté pan
1 cup oil cured black olives (kalamata olives in brine are good too, but rinse these first)
1 cup coarsely chopped Italian parsley
1/2 cup chopped red onion

Dressing:
Juice of 2 lemons
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
coarse salt and freshly ground pepper

Bring the stock to a boil in a medium saucepan and stir in the kasha. Lower the heat so that it simmers and cover. Cook for 20 minutes, until the stock is absorbed and the kasha is tender, and then remove from heat and turn into a large bowl to cool. Meanwhile, put the asparagus on a sheet pan and drizzle with 1 T. olive oil. Roast at 450 degrees for 15-20 minutes (watch it carefully so it doesn’t overcook or burn) until just tender and bright green. Remove from oven. When it’s cool enough to handle, chop into bite size pieces.

Add asparagus, walnuts, olive, parsley and red onion to kasha in bowl. Combine dressing ingredients in a jar with a lid and shake to emulsify. Add to kasha mixture and stir gently. You can serve this warm, at room temperature, or chilled–it’s good all three ways.

Cooking with these women around me made me think about other cooking compatriots, especially Chris, my best friend from graduate school, who was my constant kitchen companion for years. Check out our adventures in the kitchen here and here and here and tell us–who do you love to have beside you when you’re cooking? Who are your sisters in the kitchen?

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