by David Cecelski
Wash, peel and cut up 3 or 4 medium-size sweet potatoes, place in water and boil until soft. Mash up fine with no lumps. Add ½ teaspoon baking powder if you have it. While potatoes were boiling take 1 quart of self-rising flour and mix just like making bread with whatever you make bread with—water, buttermilk, or whatever. That’s about 1 quart of flour. Work potatoes into flour mixture and if it’s too dry, use more of the liquid till you can pinch it off. Bake like biscuit. The baking powder is mixed with the mashed potatoes. Sure hope that David likes it and Laura too.
This recipe came from Mrs. Beatrice Mason. We called her Miss Beadie. For most of my life, she lived in the farmhouse just across the fields from my family’s homeplace. When my wife and I were newlyweds and living up north, we called and asked my grandmother if she would ask Miss Beadie for her sweet potato biscuit recipe. She gave the recipe to my grandmother over the telephone and my grandmother recorded it more or less verbatim, including Miss Beadie’s hopes that my wife and I would like it. At the time, Miss Beadie was nearly a hundred years old.
Miss Beadie died twenty years ago now, but we celebrate her life every time we make these biscuits.
