SC - Re: Yams/Sweet Potatoes

[Elise Fleming]

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??
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