What’s a Southern Thanksgiving without Sweet Potato Souffle?
This recipe published in Atlanta magazine and here’s Susan Puckett’s write-up:
“Tony Morrow, chef/owner of College Park’s Pecan restaurant and Tony Morrow’s Real Pit BBQ, owes his appreciation for good food to his mother, Dr. Joyce Irons. A voracious cook ever since she was a small child, she helped her grandmother bake cakes and strip collard leaves from their stems on the family farm near Decatur, Alabama. A practicing psychotherapist, Irons’s idea of “winding down” is freezing a bushel of white corn or boning a whole turkey and rolling it up with spices like a jellyroll.
Every holiday, Morrow gathers with thirty or so family members at his mother and stepfather’s house for a massive feast that includes turkey and cornbread stuffing with giblet gravy, baked ham, chitterlings, collards (from the farm the family still owns in Alabama), macaroni and cheese, cranberry sauce and Irons’s signature sweet potato souffle—a creamy, nutmeg-spiced casserole thickly blanketed with a candy-sweet topping of coconut and pecans. The sweet potato dish, Morrow says, is a longtime favorite: ‘I could add a scoop of my mother’s homemade vanilla ice cream, and I’d have my dinner and dessert without even getting up from my seat.’ ”
