Potato Candy

I love community cookbooks. The kind that schools and churches sell as fundraisers. The kind that are full, if you're lucky, of terrible poetry and all kind of charts and gardening advice and cleaning tips and recipes for a Happy Home that include things like a spoonful of love and a pinch of patience. Community cookbooks are so fantastic. One of my favorite cookbooks from my personal collection is a cookbook of the Grossmont Hospital Auxiliary from 1975 that I picked up at a yard sale. Right after the guidelines on freezing prepared foods, it offers a Chart of Selected Communicable Diseases (an excerpt from the Home Nursing Textbook).

Anyway, tonight I was craving something sweet so I pulled out my Willing Workers Parsons Church of the Nazarene cookbook. My sister and I each have a copy of this cookbook and every time I look through it, I exclaim over one particular recipe--the potato candy. And then my sister assures me that potato candy is a treat. And then I exclaim some more, because it sounds foul. I decided to try it tonight, though. This is how you make potato candy: boil one potato and mash it with 2 lbs of confectioner's sugar. Roll out the potato/sugar mixture, spread it with peanut butter, roll it up like a jelly roll, slice it, and eat it. I boiled my potato. I pulled two packages of sugar out of my cupboard. And I couldn't do it. I could not add two POUNDS of sugar to a potato. It seemed wrong, wrong, wrong. So I cut up my potato, ate it with butter, and took myself on a walk, because just the idea of potato candy made my thighs feel like they were expanding.