For many of us, holiday feasts and company dinners are unthinkable without that star of the comfort food menu, the candied sweet potato casserole. Tender sweet potatoes dripping with melted brown sugar under a superstructure of marshmallows ever so slightly browned; it’s like a way of sneaking dessert onto the plate with your turkey in a meal that, by the time you tick off the litany of dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, rolls and pie, is an orgy of starches.
But a sweet potato casserole is a crafted thing, a delicacy that’s hard to resist if only because of the art that goes into the really good ones. I had a masterpiece in a restaurant once, a dream of a dish that began with airy whipped yam and a dose of brown sugar so perfect it would have tempted a saint off his bread and water. It was topped with marshmallows nursed to a consistency like meringue, with light veins of golden tan on snowy white: the apogee of the art of the sweet potato casserole. This one definitely should have been dessert. In fact, that was the drawback: three bites and I’d had enough.
In the meantime, my partner and I had reached the age at which the doctor pounds your chart like a Bible-thumping revivalist preacher and reminds you of the hazards of weight, cholesterol, all the demons that lurk in wait for 60-somethings. Even without his admonitions, I’m mindful of type two diabetes. It’s been more prevalent than strokes among my friends and relatives, and it’s a nasty thing. Blurred vision, messed-up circulation, constant calculations about insulin—in extreme cases, amputation.
Yes, I like candied yams now and then. But do I like seeing? Do I like walking? The price you pay for living into your seventh decade is the acceptance of some hard choices. When it comes to food, however, those choices aren’t always as bleak as you fear. We’re enjoying sweet potatoes more than ever now, thanks to a visit a few years ago to a restaurant that introduced us to sweet potato chips in a form I was able to duplicate—reasonably closely, at least—at home.
I like the chips better than I ever liked sweet potato casseroles because they are less cloying, and because they highlight the potato’s flavor rather than just turning it into candy. And they are easy to make. You just peel the sweet potato, then slice it as thinly as your kitchen equipment will allow (not especially enamored of gadgets, I do it with a cleaver and a paring knife). Then you drop them into a skillet with a little less than a quarter of an inch of hot olive oil or other vegetable oil.
After that, two things become important. One is a liberal sprinkling of grated lemon peel as a foil for the bland sweetness of the potato. (Use no salt; what you can add if you like is a light dusting of cinnamon.) The other is to cook the slices at a high temperature until they’re almost black—or even slightly blackened, but not burnt, not carbonized. A little blackening makes them crisp and coaxes such a beautiful flavor from the potato that no sugar is needed; the potato itself is sweet enough if the flavor is given its chance to sing.
Both sweet potatoes and white potatoes get on calorie counters’ bad lists because of what we load them up with, not because of what they are. Sweet potatoes offer badly needed fiber, beta carotene, vitamin C and vitamin B6, even iron and calcium. They don’t have to be turned into a confection to be delicious, and a tasty helping of non-sugar-coated sweet potato chips is a nice reminder of how delicious lower-calorie versions of old favorites can be.
