Recipes · Sick-Day Food
Mashed Sweet Potato with Ghee
Reader ratingsSweet potatoes steamed until completely soft and mashed with a spoonful of ghee and a pinch of salt: a naturally sweet, creamy, calorie-dense bowl that is easy to swallow when you can only manage a few bites.
Soft, ghee-enriched foods such as khichdi, a porridge of rice and lentils, are the classic food for an unwell person in many South Asian homes.
Safety
- Ghee is clarified butter and is nearly free of lactose and milk protein, but it can retain traces of both. People with a milk allergy should use olive oil instead.
- Sweet potatoes are rich in potassium. If you have kidney disease or take medicines that raise potassium (ACE inhibitors, ARBs, potassium-sparing diuretics), ask your clinician how often to eat them. They are also carbohydrate-rich, so count them if you have diabetes and check your glucose as usual while you are ill.
- Mash completely smooth for a toddler or anyone with trouble swallowing, and ask a clinician if swallowing has become difficult.
- This is food, not a rehydration treatment. With vomiting or diarrhea, sip an oral rehydration solution first, and seek care for signs of dehydration (very dark urine or none for 8 hours, no wet diaper for 3 hours in a baby or toddler, sunken eyes, dizziness), blood in vomit or stool, or severe belly pain.
Why it’s good for you
Orange sweet potato is rich in beta-carotene and potassium, and mashing it with a little ghee makes a soft, calorie-dense food for the days when you can only manage small portions.
Evidence
Traditional use
Long history of use; little or no direct research on this preparation.
No study has tested mashed sweet potato or ghee as sick-day food. The research on orange-fleshed sweet potato is about vitamin A: in a randomized trial of 180 South African schoolchildren, 125 g of boiled, mashed orange sweet potato a day for 53 school days improved vitamin A status compared with white sweet potato, and in rural Mozambique a program promoting it raised young children’s vitamin A intake and blood retinol. Both were done where vitamin A deficiency is common, so they do not show that sweet potato helps anyone recover from an illness.
General information from research and traditional use — not medical advice, and not a treatment for any condition. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication or managing a health condition, check with your clinician first, and seek care for symptoms that are severe or do not improve.
Ingredients
Instructions
- Set a steamer basket over about 1 inch of simmering water, add the sweet potato chunks, cover, and steam for 15 to 20 minutes, until a knife slides in with no resistance. You can also boil them in salted water for the same time and drain well.
- Return the sweet potato to the warm pot, add the ghee and salt, and mash with a fork or potato masher until completely smooth. Stir in warm water or broth a tablespoon at a time until the mash is as thick or as thin as you like.
- Taste and adjust the salt, add the cinnamon or ginger if you like, and serve warm rather than piping hot.
Tips
- For a deeper, sweeter flavor, roast whole sweet potatoes at 400°F for 45 to 60 minutes, then scoop out and mash the flesh.
- Thin the mash with warm broth into a soup when swallowing is sore, or add a spoonful of plain yogurt or a soft egg for protein as your appetite returns.
- Leftovers keep 3 to 4 days in the refrigerator; reheat with a splash of water.
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