I made sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows!

This is apparently offensive to Jesse who proclaimed his disdain for this traditional dish on Thursday evening.

"Marshmallow is a confection made from the root of the marsh mallow plant. When we think of traditional holiday meals, sweet potatoes with marshmallows always come to mind.
History: The plant name is really old, first found in an Old English medical book written around 1000 A.D., when it was spelled merscmealwe. As a candy, marshmallows date back at least to the late nineteenth century. Originally the marsh mallow plant was mixed with eggs and sugar and then beaten to foam. Today they are generally made of gelatin, water, sugar, egg whites, corn syrup, vanilla extract, and artificial sweeteners. In the 1920s, marshmallows were introduced as a topper for sweet potatoes. While sweet potatoes and marshmallows were not originally created for the holiday meal, it has become a tradition."

http://whatscookingamerica.net/Glossary/M.htm

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"Why are sweet potatoes pies sometimes served with marshmallows? During the late 19th/early 20th century marshmallows were very trendy. Mass-manufactured, plentiful and inexpensive, they were incorporated into cakes, pies, gelatin desserts, hot chocolate, candies, and the like. Marshmallows were promoted as a moden whipped cream substitute. The earliest recipes we find combining sweet potato dishes with marshmallows [in American cookbooks] were printed in the early 1930s. According to these books, marshmallows were placed on top of the finished pie for decoration. In reality? Printed recipes lag several years behind actual practice. It is a pretty safe assumption that marshmallows (or their culinary precursor, sweet cream) were added to holiday sweet potato dishes much earlier."

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpies.html

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But the real reason is that marshmallows were a cheap ingredient adopted by poor people.

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"Soul Food.Although this term applies to traditional foods eaten by African -Americans, especially in the South, it is of rather recent vintage, first in print in 1960, when it became associated with the growth of ethnic pride in African-American culture, of which food was a significant part. The term dates in print to 1964 and comes from the faternal spirit among African-Americans that their culture, heritage, and cooking gives them an essential "soulfulness" that helps define the African-American experience. Soul food dishes include chitterlings, blackeyed peas, collard greens, hominy, grits, ham hocks, and more. As Bog Jeffries, in his Soul Food Cookbook [1969] notes "While all soul food is southern food, not all southern food is soul."---Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman:New York] 1999 (p. 304)[NOTE: the 1964 reference is this: The Last Word from Soul City, New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1964 p. 62. This brief article defines terms popular with African-Americans in Harlem at that time. The definition provided of "Soul food" is chitterlings, collard greens, ham hocks, grits, black-eyed peas and rice, and the like."]
"Soul Food, early 1960s, being the "down home" food associated with poor southern Blacks, Black ethnic dishes often stem from slavery days when slaves were given the cheapest southern staples and the food parts discarded by the plantation owners, to which they added greens they had grown themselves or picked wild--and a touch of African cooking. it includes beet greens, collard greens, dandelion greens, poke greens, and turnip greens; black-eyed peas (1738, they were brought by slave traders from Africa to Jamaica in 1674 and from there to the American colonies), hog maw, hog jowel, trotters, and ham hocks; sweet potato pie, and such ubiquitous southern favorites as corn bread, fried chicken, and watermelon. The new Black awareness and pride made soul food something of a fad by the late 1960s and both Blacks and Whites were talking about the new soul food restaurants."---I Hear America Talking, Stuart Berg Flexner [Simon & Schuster:New York] 1982 (p. 51-2) "

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq7.html#soulfood

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I guess the point is that we all have points of view which create our realities, they are all valid, and they all deserve respect and consideration just as we think our own perspectives deserve respect and consideration.