The Foodist: Eating My Words

I met Chris Brown thirty some years ago in Nepal or Northern India. I'm a little fuzzy on that. I do remember arriving with him in Peshawar in Pakistan, the gateway to the Khyber Pass. We were in meat-eating country once more, and Chris had the name of a little restaurant that served steak. Well, so-called steak. The meat had been butchered in a way more suitable for stew or chile than a steak. Fast cooked, it was a tough go, and instructive about asking another culture to pander to Western taste.

I saw Chris once in San Francisco when we both got back to the States, then lost track. Until last year. He looked me up after reading a piece of mine in Saveur.

"You probably wonder what the hell I've been doing with myself?" Chris wrote. "Well, here it is: I am a culinary arts instructor here in Sacramento at Job Corps , a federally funded vocational training program for 'at-risk youth'. That's a condescending term I'm not fond of. The kids we work with are from the dark side of the American experience: ghettos, gangs, poverty, neglect, refugees from South East Asia, evangelical Christians from the Ukraine. The students range in age from 16 -- the most impossible to connect with -- to 24."

Chris came to Job Corps from gourmet catering and high end restaurants. "To this day," he wrote to me, "I feel the art and culture of cooking is one of the noblest professions on Earth. I would love to open the gates to the kingdom of Epicurean enlightenment for my students but the kinds of things they concoct don't get much more exotic than Cajun and Soul food. It's hard to get kids from impoverished backgrounds to get the nuances of inspired cooking. All I can really do is expose them to quality ingredients and how to cook from scratch, and hope they realize there is more to life than fried chicken and unsafe sex."

"Sweet Potato Pies" is the first installment from Chris Brown of food stories from the Job Corps kitchen and his life on the Sacramento Delta.

Schuyler,
It is a rainy January morning in the northern San Joaquin Valley, a perfect day to stay inside. I have slogged through the Sunday Bee, a brief slog for all the advertising, then pounded together some whole grain flour with a little water, salt and yeast. I have been staring languidly into the waterlogged backyard waiting for the ingredients to perform their timeless alchemy. A time like this, it seems, is a good time to write to you about the sweet potato pies my students and I made last week.

It took us five days to turn ten cases of garnet yams (which are really sweet potatoes -- more on this confounding supermarket nomenclature to follow) into 300 8-inch pies and 150 4-inch tarts. My students did this for an organization that has an annual fund raiser called, surprisingly, the Sweet Potato Festival. We got involved three years ago when Betty O. Williams and Dolores Johnson of the Northern California Chapter of the National Council of Negro Women approached us. Members of their organization had been making the pies in individual homes and churches for eight years. They thought we might be interested in joining in the fray. We talked over coffee, and as the details emerged it became obvious they could use some help, and that we could use the great learning opportunity, as well as the chance to be good neighbors. "We'll make you a gang of pies," was the way one enthusiastic student responded to the ladies.

By Job Corps standards we are a relatively large center. Our kitchen is capable of preparing and serving more than 400 meals three times a day. With a sixty-quart Hobart mixer, three convection ovens, rolling racks with sheet pans able to transport and hold dozens of pies at a time, and the ability to order and have delivered almost all the ingredients specified in the recipe supplied by the kind ladies of the Northern California Chapter of the National Council of Negro Women, we were well disposed to take on the task.

The recipe, developed from the original by Mary Mcleod Bethune, who started the NCNW in 1935, is the essence of simplicity. One 8-inch pie contains ½ pound of cooked sweet potatoes (they can be boiled, but baking brings out a sweet caramelized flavor) ½ pound of sugar, 1 cup of half & half, 2-ounces of butter, 2 eggs, nutmeg, ginger and vanilla. One pie! And it is intense. It's so sweet you need to drink strong, black coffee as you eat it. I've come to like it more than pumpkin pie, a close relative.

Sweet potatoes are mostly grown in the South (Georgia and South Carolina primarily) and are often called yams after a West African tuber they resemble. It's a native plant, the sweet potato, and the slaves in the South, seeing the similarity to the yam of their home, quickly appropriated it and called it by its African name, which comes forward to us as "yam". It is for no small reason that the American sweet potato has become a staple in the African American community.

You'll find that the best variety for making sweet potato pie is marketed as a yam. That's the name to look for, garnet yam being but one variation. They can get to be as large as footballs, and have flesh the color of Halloween pumpkins. The variety marketed as "sweet potato", and usually piled up next to the "yams" in the supermarket, tends to be smaller, less bulbous, and has yellow rather than orange flesh. The cooked flavor and texture are markedly different. "Yams" are sweet, mellow and creamy compared to "sweet potatoes", which are bland, starchy and fibrous. On the other hand, "sweet potatoes" are more nutritious: Ain't it always the way? For future reference, if you want to make a great sweet potato pie, use "yams"; avoid "sweet potatoes".

We use sweet potatoes/yams donated by a grower named Joe Alvernaz who has 400 acres of the gnarled things growing in Livingston, California, two hours south of Sacramento. I was stranded in Livingston with car trouble nearly 30 years ago. I remember a sultry afternoon in July and, even though I had grown up in the so-called bread basket of the world, I remember feeling overwhelmed that day with the agricultural enormity of the San Joaquin Valley. A vast sea of cultivation that stretched from the foothills of the Sierra in the east to the Coast Range in the west baked under the summer sun. For miles and miles before pulling off the highway, acre after acre of fruit and nut trees flickered by the car window like kaleidoscopic rows of green on the fret board of a gigantic guitar. Sitting in the center of the little farm town that summer I felt, despite the car trouble, very much at ease. The sleepy town was quiet and still at midday, surrounded by deep green orchards. The air had a lovely oxygenated quality, but the water tasted like chemicals. That was in 1973. Today, Foster Farms, the chicken factory, and E.J. Gallo, the General Motors of the wine industry, have massive plants there. I can only wonder what it must be like, especially for Joe Alvernaz who has been there since 1947, according to the boxes of yams stacked in our storeroom.

Anyway, in spite of the stormy weather we've been having, the Sweet Potato Festival was a great success. It was held at the community center down the street from our training center, and featured gospel singers, rhythm steppers and homespun retailers selling everything from handmade dashikis to matriarchal cookbooks. The sweet potato, of course, was the star, the center. It was featured both as a disarmingly delicate ice cream made by a venerable local ice cream parlor and the vast quantity of pies and tarts made by us -- the Culinary Arts Program of the Sacramento Job Corps.

As I walked around the crowded hall I couldn't help but notice that of the ladies who organized this event, not one of them looked younger than fifty. How much longer can they keep this up? Why aren't there any younger women getting involved? Dolores and Betty shook their heads and shrugged when I asked about it. I'll bring it up with the young women in my class, but I'm not optimistic about what their reaction will be.