Potato’s Leap to Immortality: You Know When You Need 'Em

and a recipe

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Back in the late 1930s, a woman named Pearl Ashby Tibbetts, “the busy wife of a very busy country doctor in Bethel, Maine,” wrote an article for Yankee magazine about Aroostook, Maine’s northernmost and largest county. Tucked well up into Canada, Aroostook (pron. Ah-ROOS-tick) is known to Mainers simply as “the County.” It has long been noted for two things, extreme wilderness on the one hand and extensive farmland on the other. European settlers, arriving in the early 19^thcentury, quickly recognized that well-drained, loamy soils, once cleared of wilderness, coupled with a cool northern climate, made a perfect place for potatoes. And thus the Aroostook potato empire was born.

So it’s no surprise that Mrs. Tibbetts, in her enthusiasm for all things Aroostook, should include recipes for the County’s prime product. In fact, she offered just short of 100 potato recipes—baked, fried, roasted, mashed, smashed, hashed, and boiled, in salads, soups, as fillers, as side dishes, as bread, as pancakes, or as muffins. And among the recipes for Aroostook’s pride, was a unique one—unique in the sense that it was stand-alone--for a potato candy, made by combining boiled, mashed Aroostook potatoes with a powerful amount of sugar and coconut, then cutting the fudgy coconut mixture into squares and coating the squares with melted bitter chocolate.

Today we call these little delights Needham’s, although I cannot tell you why. (My personal theory: the real name is “need ‘ems,” as in “I really need ‘em if I’m gonna cut and stack that whole cord a wood before the snow flies.”) I believe that Maine is the only place in the country where you can actually find Needham’s for sale, along with a few other culinary staples peculiar to the state, such as grape-nut ice cream and Moxie, about both of which I will have more to say another time.

Meanwhile, here’s Mrs. Tibbetts’s recipe: “One medium-sized Maine potato boiled. Add one-third package cocoanut and enough confectioner’s sugar so that it will spread well on waxed paper. When cool, cut in squares, cover with melted bitter chocolate.”

Simple enough and very easy, although a few words of advice are in order, to wit:

The best potatoes to use are white-fleshed russets like what’s grown in Aroostook County (and admittedly in other places as well), often known as baking potatoes because of their low moisture content. They’re easy to find in any supermarket produce aisle. I’ve not had good luck with yellow-fleshed potatoes (yellow finn, for instance), and besides, they give the confection a creamy color that’s undesirable. Don’t plan to cook the potato ahead of time as the whole thing works best with warm, freshly mashed potatoes.

Be sure to use unsweetened shredded coconut—there is plenty of sugar in the recipe as it stands.

The chocolate is actually a combination of truly bitter chocolate with no added sugar (Baker’s, for instance) and semisweet chocolate chips, which help to make a ganache-like coating. What about an upscale chocolate like Valrhona’s Guanaja, a very dark bitter chocolate? It does have added sugar and vanilla as well as lecithin. I’ve not had a chance to try it but if I got that chance, I would increase the quantity of bitter chocolate and decrease the semisweet chips.