SC - Re: Yams/Sweet Potatoes
Elise Fleming
alysk at ix.netcom.com
Wed Aug 20 04:16:35 PDT 1997
Linnea wrote:
>I have heard that Henry VIII liked sweet potatoes, or yams (which are
>different - one being a root the other a tuber) and ate them often.
>Any comments, recipies or information? I assume that the "they" who
>say this are refering to the African yam and not the New World sweet
>potato. They are similar, hence the trend to call both by the other's
>name.
I just purchased at Pennsic the delightful book _America's First
Cuisines_ by the knowledgeable and reputable Sophie Coe. She gives
some background on yams/sweet potatoes and their transport into Europe.
The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is different from the yam (either
Dioscorea batatas or Dioscorea trifida) and her contention is that the
taste was so different that one would not have been mistaken for the
other. (If you have the book, it's on pp. 19-20).
She mentions that there are 3 kinds of sweet potatoes in the US today:
"an old-fashioned white kind, a hardy dry yelly kind, and a moist,
sweet, dark orange kind, miscalled a yam." She then gives (above) the
botanical name for yam. "With the New World yams we will have nothing
further to do, except to say that if they are the 'ages' or n~ames"
Columbus and his successors found in the West Indies, they were
considered inferior to sweet potatoes, a quick-growing food fit only
for servants and slaves."
They apparantly were rare even in Spain through the late 1500s. I have
(somewhere) two recipes for using "potatoes" but can only recall having
seen two. Memory says that the recipes are in books from the late
1500s or mid-1600s. Ms. Coe gives some of the background on the spread
of various New World foodstuffs. Some went via Asia and became popular
there before the Europeans embraced that particular food. Some went to
Africa to become a staple before the Europeans ate the same food in any
quantity.
>From her comments, she indicates that it is the sweet potato that was
popular, not the "yam" which is a different botanical plant...Although
we, to our infinite confusion, call "sweet potatoes" "yams". Go
figure! :-)
Alys Katharine, still doing loads of laundry from Pennsic. Anyone want
some dried-out bugs??
============================================================================
To be removed from the SCA-Cooks mailing list, please send a message to
Majordomo at Ansteorra.ORG with the message body of "unsubscribe SCA-Cooks".
============================================================================
More information about the Sca-cooks
mailing list