For many Americans, sweet potatoes
are a traditional part of the Thanksgiving dinner. If you come from another
country, you may not be familiar with this vegetable. Here’s what you might
like to know.
Sweet potatoes, especially the soft
kind, are often called “yams”, but they are not really the same. Yams are
native to Africa and Asia. Sweet potatoes are native to South America (but they
are now grown in many other warm regions). Long ago, African slaves in the
Americas began calling sweet potatoes “yams”. Today, most people in the U.S.
and Canada do the same. But real yams are very rare in the Americas. You can
usually find them only in stores that sell imported foods.
Sweet potatoes can be cooked in the
same ways as white potatoes. Unlike white potatoes, they can be used for pie
filling. This is popular in the southern States.
For Thanksgiving, sweet potatoes are
usually specially prepared. One way to do this is to:
- Bake them
- Cut them in half
- Take out most of the insides
- Mix the insides with butter, spices (use spices you might use in a cake, like cinnamon or nutmeg), and a little
sugar
- Put the insides back in the skins
- Put butter and breadcrumbs on top
- Bake them again until the breadcrumbs brown
Some recipes tell you to put
marshmallows on top of the sweet potatoes. Americans have strong feelings about
this. For example, The Joy of Cooking, a famous cookbook by Irma
Rombauer and Marion Becker, says, “These are a matter of taste, or – in our
strongly biased view – lack of it.” Diane Morgan, author of The Thanksgiving
Table, says, “I can't
bring myself to write such a recipe because I don't like the sticky-sweet
topping."
For other people, however, it wouldn’t feel like Thanksgiving without
marshmallows on the sweet potatoes. The important thing is to cook them the way
you and your family like best. Some more sweet toppings you can try are brown
sugar, syrup, and fruit.
If you think Americans feel too strongly about sweet potatoes, wait till
Christmas, when they start talking about fruitcake.
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