Sweet Potato Casserole With Marshmallows: Where the Topping Came From

ByPeter
Baked sweet potato casserole topped with toasted golden marshmallows in a ceramic dish on a walnut table.

The oldest documented recipe for mashed sweet potatoes baked under marshmallows appeared in a 1917 booklet written to sell marshmallows. According to Smithsonian magazine’s account, the booklet came from Angelus, a marshmallow maker that hired a cooking-school editor to turn a candy into an everyday ingredient. Whether that booklet was truly the first, and whose name belongs on it, depends on which historian is asked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mABI40H2m5I

“When Marshmallows Met Sweet Potatoes,” from the Great Big Story channel on YouTube.

Sweet potatoes were already sweet before the marshmallows arrived

A dish with a century of sugar behind it

Sweet potatoes had been sweetened in American kitchens long before a marshmallow touched one. The Library of Congress traces the cookbook record through Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, which carried a sweet potato pudding in 1796, and through Eliza Leslie’s Directions for Cookery in 1840, as laid out in its A Sweet Potato History post (preserved in the UNT web archive). A glazed sweet potato recipe appeared in an 1896 Texas Farm and Ranch publication, and George Washington Carver compiled more than a hundred sweet potato recipes, two of them glacé versions, according to the same post.

Candied sweet potatoes, then, were a settled part of the repertoire. Atlas Obscura notes that the dish’s own ancestry is argued over, with credit going variously to Boston, the Old South, or the international Jewish culinary tradition. The same article reads the marshmallow as a “speedy workaround” for the egg whites and sugar that older recipes called for, a candy-aisle shortcut standing in for hand-whipped meringue.

The Library of Congress author reaches a cautious conclusion about geography: marshmallow-topped candied sweet potatoes most likely originated in the United States.

Split roasted sweet potatoes with orange flesh and melting butter on a weathered wooden board.

The 1917 Angelus booklet and Janet McKenzie Hill

A cooking-school editor, a marshmallow maker, and a sales problem

The most widely repeated account runs as follows. In 1917, the marketers of Angelus Marshmallows commissioned Janet McKenzie Hill, founder of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, to write recipes for a booklet that would persuade home cooks to use marshmallows regularly. The booklet contained, in the words of Saveur, “the first documented appearance of mashed sweet potatoes baked with a marshmallow topping.” The Library of Congress post cites Saveur’s October 2011 reporting for the date.

The commercial backdrop matters. Munchies reports that Angelus introduced mass-made marshmallows to Americans in 1907, and that the company was run by the Rueckheim brothers, the same family behind Cracker Jack. By 1917 the product needed a reason to leave the candy dish and enter the pantry. Fudge, hot cocoa and a vegetable side dish were all part of the pitch.

Mental Floss goes a step further and states that the casserole “didn’t originate as a family recipe,” but was “concocted by Big Marshmallow as a way to push the candy on Americans.” That is a blunt reading of a recipe booklet, and the same article adds that a corporate origin does not make a dish inauthentic. The recipe also predates the Girl Scouts’ s’mores recipe by nearly a decade, Mental Floss notes, which makes the casserole an older marshmallow tradition than the campfire one.

Aged recipe booklet open on a kitchen table beside a rolling pin and a bowl of marshmallows.

Rival claims about who was first

Four dates, three claimants, and one booklet nobody can find

The 1917 date is the standard answer, but the record contains competing entries.

Cracker Jack instead of Angelus. On MPR News, Andrew Smith, editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, credits the Cracker Jack company with a 1917 recipe booklet meant to get home cooks using marshmallows. The Munchies account links Angelus to the Rueckheim family, so the two attributions may describe one corporate family under two names, though none of the fetched sources states that outright.

A 1916 fundraising cookbook. The Takeout reports in Marshmallows And Sweet Potatoes Go Way Back that food historians “broadly agree” on 1916 as the first modern mention of sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows, in a fundraising cookbook called At the Sign of the Rolling Pin. That would put a community cookbook a year ahead of the company booklet. A separate search for the 1916 cookbook turned up only the Takeout article, so the claim rests on a single source here.

The Bunte Brothers. Atlas Obscura describes a December 1915 trade-journal case study, “Advertising New Uses for an Old Product,” about a Bunte Brothers campaign that repositioned marshmallows as an ingredient rather than a confection. Their cookbook appears to be lost, and many Angelus recipes were likely copied from the Buntes, according to the same article. If so, the campaign that produced the casserole belongs to an industry-wide push, and Angelus was one participant.

The Barrett booklet. The Library of Congress dates a Barrett Company booklet on sweet potatoes and yams to 1919 and says it suggests adding marshmallows to candied yams. The Kitchn places a Barrett pamphlet in 1918, and Atlas Obscura also lists 1918 for related publications. The year differs by source, and the sources do not settle it.

The safest statement of the record: the earliest marshmallow-and-sweet-potato recipe that multiple outlets can point to is the 1917 Angelus material, a 1916 antecedent is claimed by one outlet, and an earlier industry campaign almost certainly shaped all of it.

How the recipe spread, and who objected

From promotional booklet to church-supper staple

Once the pairing was in print, it traveled fast. Atlas Obscura lists a 1918 Women’s Patriotic League Cookbook entry that called for “five cents worth of marshmallow,” a Campfire pamphlet that followed Angelus’s booklet with “Sweet Potatoes en Casserole,” The College Woman’s Cookbook in 1923, and a 1935 Southern Cookbook of Fine Old Recipes version served with pineapple. The Library of Congress adds Ida C. Bailey Allen’s Vital Vegetables of 1928, which included browned sweet potatoes with marshmallows.

Not every cook welcomed it. Tasting Table reports that the combination met resistance from Southerners at the start. The Kitchn quotes Harriet Ross Colquitt’s Savannah Cook Book of 1933, which observed that “Most of the receipts direct you to … embellish with marsh-mallows,” and which called her own marshmallow-free candied sweet potatoes “far, far nicer.”

Marshmallow makers kept pressing. The Kitchn describes a 1930 Angelus-Campfire booklet, How Famous Chefs Use Campfire Marshmallows, that carried six sweet potato recipes. Later came an undated Cracker Jack and Campfire booklet by Marcia Camp, which offered a “Peanut Crunch Sweet Potato Casserole.”

Most of those recipes disappeared. Smith told MPR that the marshmallow-and-sweet-potato pairing was the one that “has survived — and has thrived — ever since.”

Why the casserole endures

Convenience, season, and a taste for sweet beside savory

No single study explains the dish’s staying power, but historians and food writers offer a consistent set of reasons.

The first is that marshmallows once looked like progress. Food historian Sarah Lohman tells Quartz that at the time they were seen as “very modern, as well as labor saving.” A packaged topping could stand in for a bowl of beaten egg whites.

The second is the plate it lands on. Helen Zoe Veit, a historian at Michigan State University, points out in the same article that American cooking, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, remained heavily influenced by British traditions that placed sweet elements in savory meals. Casseroles and savory puddings were also popular for thrift and taste. A sweet side next to turkey is old behavior wearing a newer costume.

The third is the calendar. The Takeout observes that sweet potatoes are a fall crop, and that although marshmallows are tied to summer s’mores, bonfires are a cold-weather staple as well, which strengthens the autumn link. Quartz adds that the dish’s overly sweet novelty is part of its appeal, since Thanksgiving is meant to differ from an ordinary dinner.

The fourth is habit. Salon, in its piece on why the dish is so beloved, gathers Reddit comments that treat it as occasion-bound: “You only eat it at Thanksgiving,” one user says, and another describes a grandmother’s version built on canned yams, butter, brown sugar and warm spices, with marshmallows added after baking for a toasted top. Mental Floss reaches the same place, noting that generations of home cooks have been making the dish their own for over a century. Veit, per Quartz, simply says that it is a tradition for many families.

What the topping does in the oven

Why a few marshmallows beat a blanket of them

The Saveur author, who defends the dish against what the piece calls “culinary snobbery,” follows the 1917 original in using marshmallows sparingly so that their large surfaces crisp in the oven. The filling underneath stays rich and earthy, and the marshmallows supply what the author describes as an airy counterpoint. Browning of that kind belongs to the same family of reactions the site covered in its Maillard reaction explainer, where a flat-top griddle does the work.

The recipe has been revised ever since. Lohman suggested to Quartz that lemon juice in the sweet potatoes “might be a huge improvement,” and the Saveur author adds a pecan crumble to the top.

Thanksgiving menus also carry a price. This site’s report on the PwC dinner cost forecast puts the 2026 average at about $90. A disputed origin, meanwhile, is a familiar pattern in American food; the history of brunch has several claimants of its own and no clean winner, and the 1917 booklet may sit in the same position.

Spoon lifting a serving of sweet potato casserole with toasted marshmallow and pecan crumble.

Sources

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