The dessert you eat with the turkey (part II)

The dessert you eat with the turkey (part II)

As I mentioned last week, my sister-in-law has requested that Rhonda and I bring our version of sweet potato casserole (which's very my sister Peggy's recipe) to the family Thanksgiving feast. It is actually one of two versions we make, but she has specifically requested the one with the marshmallows on top.

Apparently a lot of people have similar taste cravings around this time of year, due to Americans purchase approximately 35 million pounds of marshmallows from October to the end of the year, and a significant percentage of that tonnage will wind up on Thanksgiving dinner tables floating atop sweet potato casseroles.

The dish has become a Thanksgiving classic, right behind turkey and green bean casserole.

It's hard, in our family, to even imagine Thanksgiving dinner without it, and just about everybody I know agrees. I have read, however, that it wasn't completely that common on American tables until 1930. That's the year the Campfire Marshmallow Company published a booklet called, How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows.

In the booklet there were a half-dozen different recipes for whipped sweet potatoes covered with a little of sort of toasted marshmallow crust. Following that, marshmallow dishes became all the rage, and the sweet potato casserole was regarded as a glamorous dish for trendy cooks to treat their families to, but by the 60's, marshmallows had lost their cachet, and marshmallow topped sweet potato casseroles may have disappeared from sophisticated Thanksgiving tables entirely except for one thing; they are delicious, one of the few desserts you get to eat with the main course instead of after it. How sweet is that?

And whether the marshmallows on top are actually a flavor enhancer or merely a ceremonial addition, for many Thanksgiving traditionalists they are derigueur.

Marshmallows themselves have an moving lineage, going at least all the way back to ancient Egypt. As early as 2000 B.C., the Egyptians were extracting sap from mallow plants to add with honey to make a kind of cake-like candy.

This dish doubled, for the Egyptians, as both a treat and a digestive. The mallow plants used to make the concoction grew in saltwater marshes, so the dish came by its name naturally.

Thirty-five hundred or so years later marshmallows made their way to Europe, being used there originally as a sore throat remedy. The French were the first to make marshmallows similar to those we know today. In the 1880's, they began whipping mallow plant sap with sugar and egg whites into a fluff they rolled into lozenges.

These fast became so popular that confectioners couldn't make enough to visit demand, but then someone came up with the idea of replacing the mallow sap with a gelatin, which was not only less bitter, but allowed better shelf life, a more stable product, a bigger customer base and greater popularity. Without the mallow sap, whatever medical value marshmallows contained had disappeared, but by then it was being eaten pretty much for the flavor alone.

Inevitably, marshmallow candies made their way to American candy shops and grocery stores, and by the early 1900's they began to show up in all sorts of confections. First came the various marshmallow creams such as Hip-o-Lite and Snowflake. The most famous brand, and my hands down favorite, Marshmallow Fluff, was actually sold door to door at one time.

It seems that one taste was all it took for Americans to realize that marshmallows were one of the greatest fun foods of all time. In 1912, a Nashville, Tennessee candy maker invented the world's first combination candy bar, a gooey mess of marshmallow, caramel and peanuts covered with milk chocolate. His advertising slogan was, "A Nourishing Lunch for a Nickel," not entirely correct, but his GooGoo Clusters sold like hot cakes anyway,and they still do.

Mallomar's came along the next year, and then four years later another Tennessean, a salesman for the Chattanooga Bakery, came up with the idea of producing a large, chocolate covered, marshmallow-filled cookie "as big as the rising moon." This year 50 million of his MoonPies will be shipped all across the nation.

A few years later, the Girl Scouts, in their 1927 Girl Scout Handbook, taught us how to make s'mores, a recipe for the ages if there ever was one. Then, a decade later, the Campfire Girls debuted Rice Krispy treats as part of a fund-raising project.

Today we still use marshmallows to make all sorts of fun foods. Rice Krispy treats, Marshmallow Peeps, fudge and hot chocolate, not to mention about a hundred different kinds of Jell-O salads.

And, of course, as a golden brown and bubbly crown for the sweet potato casserole on our Thanksgiving tables. As I said earlier, how sweet it is.