I’ve never really been a fan of sweet potatoes or ‘yams’ as was the custom. My mother made candied yams for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and I happily ate them because Mom made them, but I tended to stay away from at all other times. Barbara hasn’t been a fan either, so they’ve never been a regular part of our mealtimes over the past four decades.
The Christmas after Mom died a decade ago, though, my brother and sister-in-law were hosting the holiday get-together and we were asked to bring the sweet potatoes. I wasn’t about to force Barbara to cook them for a dinner on my side of the families, so I started looking for something beyond some baked yams with marshmallows on top. Something that would cover up my inadequacies as a cook (I really hadn’t done much since we married, Barbara’s a far better cook than I ever will be).
I found a couple of recipes that looked promising. One that’s not on the internet anymore, that was by author Carla Hall (it’s not the same as the one on her site and it wasn’t archived by the Internet Archive) and one from Food.com. I melded them together.
It was a hit, so I was asked to bring them the next year, but I hadn’t really saved the recipes or what I modified. Fortunately, my sister-in-law had asked for it, so I was able to look back through my email archives.
My brother and his family didn’t host every year, though, some holidays they did some traveling. We did our big holiday dinner on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and Barbara never asked me to make sweet potatoes for that. So when I had to make them, I’d just look back for that email.
Then, this year, I was asked again. And I couldn’t find the email. I looked and looked, then finally remembered that depending on which device I’m on, Apple Mail saves my mail into a Sent or Sent Messages folder. They’re both on my email account, I’ve never bothered to figure out how to combine them, but until I checked Sent Messages, I couldn’t find the recipe. And I couldn’t find anything I remembered using Google.
Once I found it, I resolved to put it on Google Docs, and copied the email text to there. The next day, I went to look for it and searched for pecan in my Docs. Turns out I’d already done the same thing in 2023 and had totally forgotten it.
So, this is it, the definitive Darrel’s Bourbon Pecan Sweet Potatoes. I’ve tried to make it as explicit as possible for inexperienced cooks like myself.
Ingredients
4 unpeeled yams
Yam Mix
3 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 teaspooon vanilla
Topping
1 cup chopped pecans
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup melted butter
2 teaspoons of pumpkin pie spice (or cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger)
1/4 cup bourbon
On Top of the Topping
1/2 bag mini marshmallows
Preparation
Total Preparation Time: 2 hours
Sweet Potatoes
- Heat the oven to 375° F (190° C). Put the sweet potatoes on the rack and bake them for 45 minutes.
- Remove the baked sweet potatoes from the oven and slice them in half lengthwise (or the other way, if you prefer).
- Over a large bowl, hold onto the outside of each section of sweet potato and squeeze the contents into the bowl. The skin should come off easily, you won’t burn your fingers (much).
- Mash the sweet potatoes in the bowl.
Mix
- In a small bowl, melt 1/2 cup of butter in the microwave or oven.
- Add the eggs, granulated sugar, whipping cream, and vanilla to the melted butter and mix.
- Stir in the spice mix and bourbon.
- Pour the mix into the large bowl with the sweet potatoes.
- Use butter to coat the inside of a large casserole dish and smooth the sweet potato mix into the dish.
Topping
- Heat the oven to 350° F (175° C).
- In a medium bowl, melt 1/2 cup butter.
- Add flour, brown sugar and mix.
- Into the resulting paste, mix the pecans.
- My original notes say to “slather” the topping over the top of the sweet potato mix, but it’s really not liquid enough to spread, so shake it out of the bowl on top of the sweet potatoes and gently push it around to cover the top of the mix.
- Add some uncrushed pecans to the top.
- Bake for 40 minutes (at 350° F/190° C)).
Once it’s out of the oven, spread as many mini marshmallows as you wish over the top and turn on the broiler. Set the casserole dish on a middle rack where you can keep an eye on the top of the marshmallows so they don’t burn. It can flash over from innocuous to burnt-to-a-crisp in a couple seconds, so don’t take your eyes off them.
And that’s all there is. People keep telling me it’s like having dessert at dinner, which isn’t surprising with two cups of various sugars, sweet potatoes, and bourbon.
Happy Holidays!