--- description: Kitchen pros say you can strike this popular dish from your Thanksgiving menu. title: The One Dish Chefs Say You Should Never Serve at Thanksgiving Dinner image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb04f5a75d59eedd2/6988e5c1fb4eac32dd8948c8/thanksgiving-sweet-potato.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [U.S.](/section/us/) ## U.S. Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Food](/tag/food/) ## Food Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # The One Dish Chefs Say You Should Never Serve at Thanksgiving Dinner by [Mahita Gajanan](/author/mahita-gajanan/) ## Mahita Gajanan Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Gajanan is an editor at TIME. Nov 14, 2017 4:53 PM CUT  Maren Caruso—Getty Images by [Mahita Gajanan](/author/mahita-gajanan/) ## Mahita Gajanan Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Gajanan is an editor at TIME. Nov 14, 2017 4:53 PM CUT If professional chefs could take one item off your [Thanksgiving menu](http://www.myrecipes.com/holidays-and-occasions/thanksgiving-recipes/traditional-thanksgiving-menus "undefined"), it would be a dish that is often popular with kids as well as adults: sweet potatoes topped with oven-browned marshmallows. “There’s nothing I like about it at all,” says the chef [Guy Fieri](http://time.com/4836603/guy-fieri-interview-donkey-sauce-bourdain/ "undefined"), host of the Food Network’s _Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives_. “I don’t know where it came from.” The concept of sweetening sweet potatoes dates back to at least the late 1700s, according to the [Library of Congress](https://blogs.loc.gov/inside%5Fadams/2010/11/a-sweet-potato-history/ "undefined"). A recipe for “potato pudding” in _American Cookery_, one of the first cookbooks published in the U.S. in 1796, calls for mashed sweet potatoes, milk, nutmeg and egg whites, similar to the ingredients that go into modern sweet potato casseroles. Marshmallows began to make their way into the dish in the 1900s, as part of a ploy to convince more American home cooks to use the sugary treats, [_Saveur_ reports](https://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/thanksgiving-sweet-potato-casserole "undefined"). At a time when sweet potatoes were already commonplace in diets across the U.S., marketers for the marshmallow company Angelus Marshmallows had _Boston Cooking School Magazine_ founder Janet McKenzie Hill develop recipes based on the sweet. Her resulting 1917 booklet featured a recipe for sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows. Since then, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes have landed on Thanksgiving tables across the country, though the reaction hasn’t always been positive. According to _Saveur_, families in the South, where sweet potatoes are ubiquitous, initially enjoyed the vegetable too much to embellish it with marshmallows. Northerners, on the other hand, warmed up to the candy topping right away. Today, a handful of culinary pros who spoke to TIME say they’ve turned against what’s become a traditional Thanksgiving dish because it offers little variety in taste and texture. “It’s adding sweet on top of sweet,” says [April Bloomfield](http://time.com/4842293/april-bloomfield-on-food-trends/ "undefined"), chef at New York City’s Spotted Pig. “There are so many other satisfying ways to prepare them. I prefer the more natural sweetness of the sweet potatoes with a touch of acidity to balance it out.” Michael Symon, host of ABC’s _The Chew_, agrees: “There’s no texture, no balance — just sweet on sweet and soft on soft. The premise of the dish frustrates me.” That doesn’t mean you should throw out your sweet potatoes ahead of Thanksgiving — there are several ways to prepare them without marshmallows. Symon suggests combining them with Idaho potatoes for some acidity and topping the dish with praline for textured sweetness. Others, however, would rather see an end to sweet potatoes altogether. For Mashama Bailey, chef at The Grey in Savannah, Ga. whose family is from the South, sweet potatoes were a dinnertime staple when she was growing up. Now, though Bailey acknowledges the vegetable’s popularity at Thanksgiving, she says she’d rather do without it. “I’m just over it,” she says. “It’s just the least interesting and probably the least satisfying dish on the table.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/5021413/thanksgiving-chefs-what-not-to-serve/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/5021413/thanksgiving-chefs-what-not-to-serve/"},"headline":"The One Dish Chefs Say You Should Never Serve at Thanksgiving Dinner","datePublished":"2017-11-14T16:53:52.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T18:13:09.423Z","description":"Kitchen pros say you can strike this popular dish from your Thanksgiving menu","url":"https://time.com/5021413/thanksgiving-chefs-what-not-to-serve/","keywords":["Food","onetime"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb04f5a75d59eedd2/6988e5c1fb4eac32dd8948c8/thanksgiving-sweet-potato.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Mahita Gajanan","jobTitle":"Gajanan is an editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/mahita-gajanan/"}],"articleSection":"U.S.","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltb04f5a75d59eedd2/6988e5c1fb4eac32dd8948c8/thanksgiving-sweet-potato.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Overhead of two men eating holiday meal","caption":"Overhead of two men eating holiday meal","creditText":"Maren Caruso—Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/us/","name":"U.S."}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/food/","name":"Food"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/5021413/thanksgiving-chefs-what-not-to-serve/","name":"The One Dish Chefs Say You Should Never Serve at Thanksgiving Dinner"}}]}] ```