The Sweet Potato Capital of the World

Vardaman, Mississippi, has been proclaimed as “Sweet Potato Capital of the World,” a claim that’s hard to dispute. And the leading ambassador for Vardaman Sweet Potatoes is probably Jane Cook-Houston, manager of “Sweet Potato Sweets,” a family-owned bakery that turns out every type of sweet potato baked goods you can imagine. It’s located on Highway 8, the city’s main artery, in that stretch known as Sweet Potato Avenue. Although Jane is the manager, she is quick to point out that her father, 92-year-old Paul Cook, is the owner, although he stays too busy out in the field growing sweet potatoes to actually run the place himself.

When I recently sat down with Jane in Vardaman to talk sweet potatoes, the first order of business was to define what a sweet potato is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. “Yams are not grown in the United States,” Jane told me, “so when people think they’re eating yams, they’re almost certainly eating sweet potatoes. When they say ‘candied yams’, they mean candied sweet potatoes. If you look at the ingredients in a can of yams, the first one you see listed is ‘sweet potatoes.’” Yams are mainly grown in Africa, and, unlike a sweet potato, their flesh is white like a regular potato and not sweet. Unlike yams, you really don’t have to “candy” a sweet potato.

So what makes Vardaman the Sweet Potato Capital of the World? “It started out as sort of a self-proclamation,” Jane said, “but there’s no doubt that we’ve grown into that title. About fifty years ago, some farmers from here went to Jackson and talked with the governor about establishing a brand for Vardaman sweet potatoes, and he said ‘Why not just proclaim it as the Sweet Potato Capital of the World’? And so we did.” But the claim would have never stuck unless the product could back it up.

“Mississippi doesn’t raise the most sweet potatoes,” Jane said, “we just raise the best. North Carolina, for example raises more tonnage than we do, but we have people from North Carolina who will call us and have us ship potatoes to them because the taste is simply better. Our soil is perfect for sweet potatoes, and we found that out by accident when some farmers from Tennessee brought sweet potatoes with them when they moved to this area.” Jane explains that it’s something in the soil. “Soon, everybody wanted to start raising sweet potatoes because they were so good and the yield was so great. It was just it was just the best, all-around sweet potato you could get.”

Jane’s family has been into growing sweet potatoes all her life. “When I was a kid, my mom would tell me to go down to the shed and get some sweet potatoes for dinner that night. I went down there, and my dad said what you looking for? I told him, and he said, ‘You tell your Mama those sweet potatoes are to sell; they’re not to eat.’ So we didn’t eat very many, but our favorite treat after school was a fried sweet potato with sugar sprinkled on. Mama would just slice them round, and fry them in vegetable oil, and take them out and sprinkle sugar on them. It was such a treat for us, and it was simple and easy.”

Years ago, Jane’s father realized that even though Vardaman was surrounded by sweet potatoes, there was no place for a person passing through to buy one. “We started selling them in small, ten-pound boxes. And soon the people started asking for larger quantities, so we started packing forty-pound boxes. Pretty soon, three ladies here in town whose husbands were farmers started baking pies and sweet potato bread and selling them out of a store just west of here. After a while, two of the ladies dropped out of the business, and Mama began running it herself. The store then moved to our present location, and over the years, the menu has expanded.”

It has indeed expanded. Sweet Potato Sweets offers a truly impressive variety of edibles, all based on the sweet potato. You’ll find sweet potato salsa, sweet potato fudge, sweet potato cheese straws, sweet potato marmalade, sweet potato peanut butter, and even sweet potato doggie treats. And, of course, there are sweet potato cookies, sweet potato bread, and the world-famous sweet potato pie. “We will put sweet potatoes in anything,” Jane said, without a hint of exaggeration. “As a matter of fact, at our harvest banquets we have had cooking contests in which people have come up with sweet potato salad dressing, sweet potato sausage, sweet potato pizza, and even sweet potato ice cream. We’ve had sweet potato everything. We have a website – sweetpotatosweets.com — that lists things that we ship, but we have even more items in the store. We can’t ship casseroles and such; it’s just the sweets and the treats that you can buy from our website.”

Sweet Potato Sweets does quite an in-store business, and it’s been very good for the Town of Vardaman. “I’m going to say 95% of our business comes from that highway,” Jane said. “We have wonderful local customers, but they’re not our main source of income. It’s the people coming in from out of state, from out of the county. And all these out-of-staters and out-of-towners who come in here, they represent tax sales tax revenue for Vardaman that we would not otherwise see. Without sweet potatoes, the only reason they would have stop would have been for gas. And some of that is not just one-time money. We have some wonderful people that come back every year to visit and to buy sweet potatoes.”

Sweet Potato Sweets is located at 117 E. Sweet Potato Avenue (Highway 8) in Vardaman. The website is www.sweetpotatosweets.com.  Phone: (662) 682-9647. They are on Facebook. Store hours are Monday through Saturday, 8:00 to 5:00.