Slop, slop, everywhere, but not a bit to eat. That’s how many editorialists are describing our current state of affairs. If I had to place a bet on the Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year, it would be “slop.” Last year’s was “rage bait” which at least had some human input. For example, the viral recipe where a set of hands puts a hamburger patty in the middle of a pan, cuts out a smiley face, surrounding the face with chopped onions. That’s not even the best part: cracking three eggs into the eyes and mouth of the hamburger smiley face. Steam it awhile and you have an abomination.
Another one that, unfortunately, started infiltrating holiday spreads last year was the Little Debbie Christmas Tree Dip. Basically, you just blend a package of the vanilla Christmas tree cakes together with cream cheese and milk (or something like that). Voila! Now you can tell all your friends and family to stuff your stocking with insulin. I was downright horrified when our friend Loretta was absolutely raving about it to me over the phone after she’d been to a holiday party. People actually make this stuff?!
Slop, until recently, served a purpose. Namely, feeding pigs. I remember my grandfather gleefully gathering up leftovers and kitchen scraps for the chickens and the pigs. In this way, there really was a use for everything. With the rise of artificial intelligence, I loathe even going on Facebook now, lest I get inundated with one ChatGPT listicle after another. As a journalist, I could go on and on about how a bulleted list of pure pathos punctuated with emojis isn’t a substitute for real human language, but this is a recipe column. No, I’m here today to talk about a cook from Greensboro, Alabama that recently came to my attention. Her name is Edna Jackson.
To give credit where credit is due, John is the one who brought this YouTube channel to my attention. Under the channel name, EdnaJacksonCooking, this computer-generated woman speaks with an equally computer-generated voice offering various “soul hacks” in the kitchen. Now, algorithms are quite responsive to the “life hack” or “hack” terminology, which is internet speak for just doing something correctly. Although, I wouldn’t really go seeking out these life hacks in the hopes that they’ll improve anything for you. For instance, one life hack that sticks with me is soaking a strawberry in bleach to get a “white strawberry.” Not only can you not eat the strawberry, but we already have pineberries, which are basically white strawberries. I know, I know, they’re more than just white strawberries, but you get my point.
Anyway, this Edna character prattles on in one 15-minute video after another, promising you she’ll reveal her ultimate secrets at the end of the video after she’s listed off 20 other things you already knew. You see, the thing that drives me nuts about everyone using AI to express their thoughts is that it doesn’t do a great job at getting to the deadgum point. I don’t know how many times I have to hear Edna Jackson tell me my cabbage is grey and smells like a wet sock before she tells me how to get it to not look grey, to not smell like a wet sock. If any real person talked like that, they’d wear themselves out beating around the bush so much.
Of course, Edna is also selling a cookbook, complete with oversaturated images of disproportionately steamy buttermilk biscuits that look like something out of the Teletubbies universe. This $30 wonder blessedly has a free pdf preview with a handful of recipes that shockingly are all on a website of the same name. It’s called Soul on the Table and boasts about Jackson’s childhood in Greensboro, and even has a section titled “Fish and Coastal Suppers.” Unless Miss Jackson is speaking of her summering in Mobile, I’d be very curious what coast we’re close to in Greensboro, Alabama. It’s unfair of me to pile all of this on Edna, though, because (as it turns out) there’s a whole network of these Southern AI-generated grandmothers showing you how to cook things their way. To the surprise of no one, their recipes are pretty much all the same, right down to the examples they offer: sweet potato pie, buttermilk cornbread, a pot of greens, etc. Sure, these are in every Southern cookbook, but they have the added benefit of being vetted by real people, not just regurgitated through a computer. What’s fascinating about this phenomena is just as quickly as these AI grandmas started cooking on Instagram and X, their profiles just as quickly vanished. Now, they all are shilling their AI-generated cookbooks, with each of these home cooks claiming to be from some part of the rural South.
Seeing all this talk of AI-generated sweet potato pies had me thinking about finally rolling out the real deal sweet potato pie. Seeing how boring the AI version of the recipe is, I thought it best to give you a recipe that really works. I’ve made this pie a couple times and I really have to be sparing with it because I could easily eat the whole thing. Some of you may recognize the contributor of this recipe, but we shall see.
- Jean Childs Young’s Sweet Potato Custard Pie
- 1 (9-10 inch) pie crust
- 3 medium (1 1/4 pounds) unpeeled sweet potatoes
- 4 Tablespoons (1/2 stick or 57 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 1/2 cups heavy cream or evaporated milk
- 3 large eggs
- 1/2 cup (96 grams) lightly packed dark brown sugar
- 1/2 cup dark corn syrup or sorghum
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- Whipped cream for serving
Place pie crust in a 9 to 10 inch deep dish pie pan, crimp the edges, and set aside in the fridge.
Rinse and pat dry the sweet potatoes. Place them in a large saucepan, cover with water, and boil in their “jackets” (unpeeled) until very tender when pierced with a fork, 25 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the potato. You should be able to stick a fork nearly through with ease. Drain, and when cool enough to handle, peel and mash. You’ll need 1 3/4 cups mashed sweet potatoes.
Heat the oven to 375 degrees with a rack in the lower middle.
Place the warm sweet potatoes, butter, and vanilla in a large bowl and stir until the butter melts. Stir in the cream or evaporated milk.
Separate the eggs, place the whites in a large clean bowl and the yolks in the bowl with the sweet potatoes. Stir vigorously to incorporate the yolks. Stir the brown sugar, corn syrup or sorghum, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and salt into the sweet potato mixture until smooth.
Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer on high speed until nearly stiff peaks form, about 3 minutes. Fold the beaten whites into the sweet potato mixture until smooth. Pour into the piecrust and place the pan in the oven.
Bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean and the pie is browned around the edges, 53 to 58 minutes. Let cool in the pan for 1 hour before slicing and serving with whipped cream, if desired.
I’ve mentioned this hack before, but I use a buttermilk biscuit dough for my pie crust. Set that sucker in a cast iron skillet and this pie will hold. In fact, this has been one of the few pies I’ve successfully removed from the pan to serve on a pretty platter. Although, everyone loves to see a cast iron skillet doing double duty. For those of you unfamiliar with her work, Mrs. Young was a Marion native who went on to marry Andrew Young, a decorated politician as far as Georgia goes. If there’s any way to bag a future ambassador to the United Nations, this pie could very well do the trick. Honestly, I’m surprised it took a tirade against artificial intelligence to get this recipe out of me. I also highly recommend the sorghum if you can get your hands on some. Last time I saw any for sale was at Ford Farms in Selma, but things change all the time.
There’s an interesting little debate amongst Southern home cooks that I’ve recently become aware of: whether or not you grew up with white corn syrup or dark corn syrup. Personally, we always had both on hand, because you just never know. However, much like the many opinions I’ve encountered over the years about Southern foodways, somebody has something they’re loyal to. For me, I don’t go tit-for-tat about the little things like that. As long as I know your recipe came from your human mother, or your human grandmother and not some whirring set of wires in Data Center Alley, we should be on the same page.
Y’all, there’s not a lot I ask for these days. Going out and hearing all about what y’all are cooking is all I need to keep this column up and running. As we hand over more and more of our lives to the machines we made to simplify them, let us not forget the beauty in slowing down. It’s ironic to me that there’s a proliferation of this AI-slop of six-fingered grandmothers telling you how to cook like in the old days, while acting as a proxy for the technology that is threatening that very way of life. No, I’m not gonna be the Luddite revolutionary that tells you to go smash the machines, but I will tell you (much like a grandmother would) to put that phone down. An AI cook claiming Black Belt ancestry is about as valuable in the kitchen as having a toilet for a sink. One thing AI can never replace is your real grandmother taking you by the hand and showing you how a biscuit dough is supposed to feel or to stop opening the oven door so much as to not “worry the pie to death.” One perk about all this AI-slop is if you make something that really doesn’t work out, I could see blaming AI for generating a terrible, unworkable recipe for you. Maybe you have an out now for any of your forthcoming holiday culinary emergencies. You’re welcome in advance.
