When I think of sweet potatoes, I think of calling my mom back in college, asking for her sweet potato biscuit recipe, which was my nana’s recipe written in her one-room-schoolhouse-neat teacherly cursive script.
Fall is officially here, whether or not it feels like it in your area.
Sweet potatoes may not be as symbolic of fall as pumpkins are, but they are to me and my family. And we’re not that unique.
Evoking that family-tradition nostalgia in your marketing promotions is a classic strategy that I fully support.
It’s an especially sweet way to pull at consumer heartstrings (and yes, wallet and purse-strings) given how much families couldn’t travel to see each other during this pandemic in 2020 and 2021.
My earliest memory is watching my nana make these biscuits in her Eastern Shore, Md., kitchen with the mustard-yellow linoleum flooring.
In their totally non-professional recipe using four medium sweet potatoes, I hear my mom’s and nana’s voices: “The consistency of the dough is a key!”
I lost that original recipe, but I can now search my e-mail for “sweet potato biscuits” and come up with the e-mail thread with my mom and sister-in-law. It’s probably in my Food or Family e-mail folders. I rewrote it myself and placed it in a laminated file in my personal recipe binder.
The orange potato-y memories carry me through different life stages.
I recall traveling back home to Boynton Beach, Fla., from my food-writing newspaper job and studio apartment in Fort Myers, Fla., making the biscuits with my mom.
We have a photo of us proudly holding the tray of biscuits.
Maybe five or 10 years later, there’s a photo of my mother’s Maine coon cat, Rusty, watching us from behind her kitchen bar in her Raleigh, N.C., home, as we made the biscuits while I visited her for the holidays from my Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment. We laughed so hard after forgetting some key step with the KitchenAid mixer, resulting in batter flying all over the kitchen, speckling the cupboards and refrigerator.
We have a photo of that too.
Last Christmas, when I hadn’t seen my mom in more than a year and she’d been kept away from her only grandchild to protect them both during COVID-19, I used that recipe and a video call during dinner to feel my mother’s presence with us. How I missed her. But seriously, the sweet potato biscuit recipe felt like a balm in such an isolating, anxious time.
That vibrant orange, honeyed, soft, comforting potato-biscuit with a dab of butter was the closest thing I could get to the mom hug I so longed for.
Sweet potatoes transported me home for the holidays, and they will again for years to come, no matter where my loved ones and I are in the world — or beyond.
Amy Sowder is The Packer’s Northeast editor. E-mail her at [email protected].