Ray… What did you do Ray? It’s the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.

There was quite the heated debate about marshmallows at dinner last night. The Wife® was imagining that there was a time that people had to eat Sweet Potatoes without the assistance of marshmallows. I disagreed, taking the position that Marshmallows have been around a long time. Maybe as long as Sweet Potatoes. She then claimed that Ma and Pa (if you know The Wife® you know that no conversation is complete until Ma and Pa come up) didn’t have marshmallows.

Right now you are all wishing you could have been there to witness that stimulating debate.

Anyway, I take the position that we were both partially right, and partially wrong. Which is unusual, since I usually take the position that The Wife® is fully wrong when we debate things as heady as marshmallows.

Lets get this out of the way first. Sweet Potatoes were first domesticated in South America about 5000 years ago.

The first marshmallows were consumed in Egypt in around 2000 B.C. So, Sweet Potatoes have been around for about 1000 years longer than marshmallows. I was wrong.

Marshmallow was made from the mallow plant that grows wild in marshes. The Egyptians squeezed sap from the mallow plant and mixed it with nuts and honey to form their version of the tasty treat.

Marshmallows were introduced to France in the early 1800′s. The treats had to be whipped by hand and it was quite a time consuming process. In the late 1800′s confectioners invented a way to automate the process, and that is when gelatin replaced whipped mallow root as the key ingredient.

It was in 1948 when the modern marshmallow came into being. A chap name Alex Doumak patented the extrusion process that is still in use today. In fact, together with Kraft, Doumak Inc. produces most of the commercially available marshmallows today. They are just packaged under different brand names.

So, as you can see, it would have been possible, though not probable, that Ma and/or Pa could have obtained some marshmallow for use on their sweet potatoes. Making me right.

Source: The National Confectioners Association and wiki pages on marshmallows (surprisingly unhelpful) and sweet potatoes