STOP Boiling Sweet Potatoes! Try These Old Appalachian Cooking Secrets

🔗 Grandma never wrote hers down, so I finally did. All 118 plus much more. Get em before they're gone: https://www.opalrowe.com Opal Rowe grew up when a sweet potato was supper, seed, medicine, and money all at once — and she's sure most folks ruin theirs the minute they drop it in a pot of boiling water. In this one she sets that right, counting down the old Appalachian ways to bake it, keep it, cure it, and stretch it the way the mountains always did — right down to the one thing she says she never told a living soul. In this one, Opal covers: • Why boiling pours the best of a sweet potato straight down the sink • Baking it whole and slow until it weeps its own syrup on the pan • Holding a whole winter's crop with no cellar — sand, sawdust, straw, and a warm room • The crustless "poor folks pie" and the old-time cobbler they called a sonker • Drying it, canning it, and even making coffee from it when money ran short • The very last one, saved for the end — the thing she never told a soul Opal reads every comment herself — so tell her who it was that taught you to cook a sweet potato, and what your people call these up your holler. CHAPTERS 0:00 Why you should never boil a sweet potato 3:03 A baked one split with butter and sorghum 3:55 The sweet potato pie folks reached for before pumpkin 4:56 Candied with sorghum, not store syrup 6:03 Never put a sweet potato in the icebox 7:03 Mashed savory in the skin, not sweet 8:01 Never peel it before you cook it 9:02 Fry yesterday's baked ones in bacon grease 10:05 Baked in the pan with the country ham 11:03 Fried sweet potato hand pies 12:08 Roasted right in the ashes and coals 13:12 Tucked in the pan under the Sunday roast 14:14 Worked into the Sunday biscuits 15:09 Sweet potato hash in the iron skillet 16:23 The skin is the best part — crisp it 17:24 Sliced in rounds and fried in grease 18:27 The sweet potato and milk supper 19:43 Worked into cornbread — a sweet potato pone 20:44 Dig them before the first hard frost 21:38 Handle them like eggs — one bruise rots the rest 22:43 The old dry white sweet potato 23:45 Cure them warm and close for a week or two 24:57 Curing heals every nick so they keep till spring 26:00 Bake it till it weeps syrup on the pan 27:05 Sprout your own slips from one saved root 28:11 Set slips and dig roots by the signs 29:11 The mountain potato house kept warm all winter 30:10 Don't wash them before you store them 31:04 Keep them warm and dry, not like an Irish potato 32:20 Packed in dry sand and newspaper 33:22 Bank the crop in a straw-and-dirt hill 34:26 Grated into the spice cake to keep it moist 35:28 The pie without a crust 36:38 Sweet potato cobbler — the old-time sonker 37:51 Bed the seed roots in a warm hotbed 39:04 Hold back your best roots for seed 40:11 Sun the fresh-dug crop to start the sweet 41:16 Plant the slips in high loose ridges 42:11 A sweet potato pone, grated raw into the batter 43:15 Slice them thin and dry them for winter 44:15 Sweet potato butter, cooked down slow 45:26 Canning them in a jar 46:29 The vine leaves are good eating, not poison 47:35 Cut greens off the vine all summer 48:37 Culls, peelings, and vines fed the hogs 49:30 When money was short, they made coffee from it 50:32 The winter root that kept a whole family 51:32 The warm poultice the old women swore by 52:38 Stretching the sugar ration on its own sweetness 53:44 The garden root that was also a paycheck 54:33 A hot baked one warmed a child's hands to school 55:30 Baked by the peck for dinner on the ground 56:24 A hill of them was money in the bank 57:26 Bank the fire and set it in the warming box 58:34 Draw up a chair and set a spell