Hayman Sweet Potato
A white skinned greenish-yellow fleshed sweet potato, the Hayman has rounded spade-like pale green foliage with purple stems. The tubers are regularly oblong, smooth, large and white—blunt at the ends, or spindle shaped. The variety bears prolifically—one reason for its quick adoption by commercial seeds-men. When baked the flesh of the Hayman turns dull yellow or grey-greenish—not the most alluring of colours. Throughout the 19th century it was "the earliest sweet potato grown and the easiest one to keep in winter" (North Carolina Department of Agriculture, 1905). Its yield was normally around 650 bushels per acre on well prepared soil; it could grow on clay soils or in sandy loam equally well.
The flavour is delicate and sweet, with a minty note that was particularly savoured by persons who ate sweet potatoes frequently. Yet, those who ate sweet potatoes less frequently (or just during holidays) historically opted for the more brashly sugary sweet potatoes. Northerners with a penchant for mealy boiling sweet potatoes had a particular problem with the Hayman, judging it not of first-rank quality and rather favoured the Nansemond (or Jersey) sweet potato as much as Southern markets preferred the Hayman. One feature of the Hayman that particularly distressed persons not familiar with the variety was its tendency to exude sugar as a viscous black fluid at its ends. For knowledgeable producers this was the sign that the potato has been cured to perfection, but to those unfamiliar with the Hayman, the sugar secretions suggested that the potato was "coarse", "had gone bad" and was "only good for stock feeding " (Sugary Southern Sweet Potatoes in the North," The Garden Magazine 7 June 1907).
In the period from 1900 to 1910 northern agronomists and culinary writers systematically denounced the Hayman potato and other sugar exuding white skinned varieties. In the latter decades of the 19th century it was a nationally cultivated variety, but in the 1920s, as the visual aesthetics of potatoes became important, particularly because of pie competitions, the green-yellow pallor of the Hayman's meat was deemed less attractive than the bright orange pumpkin yams and reddish meat of other varieties, leading to a further diminution of its popularity. Eventually its cultivation and consumption were constricted to its first home in the coastal zone from the outer banks of North Carolina, tidewater Virginia, and the Eastern Shore where the taste of the potato remained the standard against which all other varieties were judged.
In the 21st century it has become the signature sweet potato of the Virginia Eastern Shore. Greatly prized locally, the potatoes also enjoy a following among consumers, many with Southern origins, in the large metropolitan areas of the north-eastern United States.
