Spudelicious!!
Customer Rating: 
From the Orange County Register
November 18, 2004
by Judy Bart Kancigor, author of Cooking Jewish: 532 Great Recipes from the Rabinowitz Family
Thanksgiving is around the corner, and even those who count the can opener as their favorite (and only) kitchen tool are planning to pull out all the stops for this feeding frenzy of a holiday. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Fresh turkey or frozen. Free range or...not. To brine or not to brine. And that's just the main dish. Come to the side of the plate, and the real confusion begins. What on earth is the difference between sweet potatoes and yams? Well, when it comes to potatoes I know whom to turn to.
Distinguished cookbook editor Roy Finamore, with Fine Cooking magazine's Molly Stevens, offers 300 exciting, spud-studded recipes from appetizers, soups and salads through main courses, breads and even desserts in One Potato, Two Potato (Houghton Mifflin), an encyclopedic, lavishly photographed guide to everything you ever wanted to know about this humble vegetable.
Sweet potatoes, botanically unrelated to the potato, but included in the book nonetheless, are often mislabeled as "yams," Finamore explains. The true yam is more like the potato and not nearly as sweet as the sweet potato. Its texture upon cooking is also more like that of the potato, rather than the custardy texture of the sweet potato. Chances are your candied "yams" are really candied sweet potatoes.
"It's an American thing, this confusion," writes Finamore, who credits vegetable authority Elizabeth Schneider for tracing the mix-up to the African slaves, who began calling the American sweet potato "yams" because of their resemblance to the yams they remembered back home. "But the resemblance ends there," continues Finamore. "Yams and sweet potatoes come from different families and have different flavors and different uses."
As Americans, we have a sweet tooth, and if it's sweet you're going for in your "yam" dish, chances are, no matter whether the sign in the supermarket says "yams" or "sweet potatoes," they're both technically sweet potatoes. The copper-colored variety with the bright, moist, orange flesh is the jewel "yam" and is considered the most versatile of the sweet potato family. It is used in any recipe where color and appearance are important. The garnet with its deep red or purple skin and soft, moist, lighter orange flesh is recommended for pies, cakes and breads or in recipes that call for mashed or grated sweet potatoes, because the flesh becomes soft upon cooking.
And for the health conscious, sweet potatoes pack a punch. According to the Sweet Potato Council of California, sweet potatoes have twice the daily recommended allowance of Vitamin A, one-third of our daily requirement of Vitamin C, are high in Vitamin B6, iron, potassium and fiber, high in complex carbohydrates and low in calories...well, without all the stuff you pile on it, I guess, but where's the fun in that?
I always adored my grandmother's sweet potato pie with melted marshmallows, but it was a secret indulgence. I somehow thought of it as the untrendy stepchild of Thanksgivings past, or as Rodney Dangerfield might have put it, "It ain't got no respect." That is, until I heard the late Julia Child interviewed one year right before the holiday. She was asked what dish she was most looking forward to for Thanksgiving, and she said mashed sweet potato casserole with marshmallows! Ah, sweet vindication.
Finamore's version is adapted from the favorite casserole found in the 1959 "River Road Recipes" by the Junior League of Baton Rouge. Use as many marshmallows - regular or mini - or as few as you like. Finamore also suggests substituting 1 cup canned crushed pineapple for the milk, if you prefer, and/or adding some sherry or rum for extra punch.
RIVER ROAD BAKED SWEET POTATOES WITH MARSHMALLOWS
From "One Potato, Two Potato" by Roy Finamore with Molly Stevens
3 to 3 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Freshly grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon orange juice
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 tablespoons sugar
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
Marshmallows
Heat the oven to 450° F. Prick the sweet potatoes with a fork and bake on a foil tray until tender, about 1 hour. Lower oven temperature to 350° F. Butter a large gratin dish or 3-quart casserole. Peel potatoes and mash in a bowl with a fork. Stir in cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange juice. Combine milk, vanilla, sugar, and butter in a saucepan over medium heat and bring just to a boil. Stir this into the potatoes. Spoon half the potatoes into the baking dish Cover with layer of marshmallows, then repeat with remaining potatoes and another layer of marshmallows. Bake until well browned, about 20-25 minutes. Serve hot. Serves 8-10.
Colcannon, Pierogies, Vichysoisse, and Samosas oh my
Customer Rating: If this is the kind of book an editor of other food writers can give us, then I wish more of these largely invisible literary yeomen would take up the pen to do their own material more often. This is an excellent example of my favorite kind of book. It deals exclusively with recipes based on a single main ingredient. This makes it the book to go to when you have that last pound of spuds in a ten pound bag or you need some starch recipe to round out a meal and you can't face another rice dish, or you just want to do something a little different for mashed potatoes. Therefore, I am always inclined to give a good rating to this kind of book as long as the authors don't drop the ball between the kitchen and the word processor. These authors, Roy Finamore and Molly Stevens, have kept a firm grasp on the ball throughout the game.
It is not entirely true that the book deals exclusively with recipes containing potatoes, as it also contains recipes for sauces, dips, and fillings for potatoes. One way or another, every recipe supports a course with a potato dish.
The book is divided up into chapters which suit it's star player and the list of chapter titles shows just how versatile our little spud can be. The chapters are:
Appetizers and First Courses with roasted and dressed potato skins with appropriate fillings, dips, spreads, and sauces. It also includes the famous Spanish tapas called tortillas plus potato stuffed pastries such as knishes, samosas, and pierogies.
Soups with all the usual potato and leek soups and recipes for various stocks. It also contains several chowders and potato soups with other root vegetables.
Salads include just about every kind of potato salad you can dream of. As one of my favorite types of spud dishes, salads are one of the things potatoes do well which simply can't be matched by it's starchy competitor, rice.
Main Dishes includes potatoes joined up with some form of protein. Some dishes are famous such as corned beef hash and shepherd's pie and gnocchi. Some dishes are obscure, but no less interesting.
Mashed Potatoes contains 29 recipes for mashed white and sweet potatoes, but other chapters include additional recipes for mashed potatoes such as Colcannon, which is listed under baked and roasted recipes.
Fried Potatoes gives another host of recipes, which cannot be matched by rice. All the favorites such as French Fries, Home Fries, Hash Browns, Potato Pancakes, and potato chips are here.
Baked and Roasted Potatoes contains all the usual classics for both white and sweet potatoes, including oven fries, pommes Anna, candied sweet potatoes, and roasted potatoes with other root vegetables.
Gratins and Scalloped Potatoes is another of my favorite spud styles. This is one of the few corners of the book where I find a recipe missing. There is nothing similar to the Sicilian potato gratin made with chicken stock and olive oil rather than with cream.
Boiled Potatoes includes a lot of sauces to `kick up' the bland boiled spuds and includes German Potato Dumplings.
Breads and Rolls includes the famous use of potato in foccacia plus all sorts of breads where the gluten free potato starch makes the breads more tender.
Desserts is a rather short chapter wherein potatoes are primarily used as a starch addition to pastry doughs.
As suggested by some of the contents above, the book covers both white and sweet `potatoes' even though the two plants are not closely related biologically. They are closely related in their culinary applications, since you can do to a sweet potato almost everything you can do to a russet.
It should be no surprise that the book deals with the three main types of potatoes in great detail and is very careful to specify which type of potato is best with each dish.
The chatter in the headnotes and introductory sections to each chapter are engagingly written. They are informative without being cluttered with gushing emotions about beautiful vegetables. These are spuds after all. One of my favorite sidebar sections discusses the `Art and Craft of Tourner', a nearly forgotten technique which rounds the `sharp' edges and corners of sliced potatoes to create shapes which will cook more evenly. Burning the edges of potatoes just once when you roast sliced potatoes is enough to convince you that this synonym for tedium may just have a point.
The photographs are few, but of very good quality. As I would expect from a house like Houghton Mifflen, the simple, straightforward layout and fonts are very easy on the eyes.
This is not a classic and will probably go out of print in five years, which is all the more reason to get your copy now. A worthy addition to the library of anyone who cooks often and needs good sources of variety in inexpensive ingredients. Good recipes which are cheap. That's a winner.
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