Home › The Principles of Cookery › Yams, American
Yams, American
Yams, when roasted or boiled, form a nutritious and palatable article of food. They are excellent prepared as follows. Cut them into slices half an inch thick, and form these into rounds about the size of the top of a tea-cup. Wash, drain, and dry them well, put them into a well-buttered saucepan, and season with a little salt and grated nutmeg. Moisten with water, cover closely, and let them simmer gently till done enough. Turn them over frequently, that they may be equally and lightly coloured on both sides. Pile them upon a dish. Pour round them white sauce, sweetened and flavoured, and serve. Time to simmer the slices, about three-quarters of an hour.
A gentle butter-and-water braise on the stovetop, finished with a sweet white sauce — closer to a dessert course than a vegetable side by modern reckoning.
- What "American yams" means hereVictorian British cookbooks used the name loosely, and the vegetable arriving from the Americas was usually the sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas. Buy orange-fleshed sweet potatoes; true yams (Dioscorea) are drier, starchier, and behave more like a floury potato in this method.
- The timing is far too longThree-quarters of an hour will reduce half-inch sweet potato rounds to mush. Covered, over a low flame with a little water, they are tender in 15 to 20 minutes. Test with a knife tip from about 12 minutes on.
- Cutting the rounds"The size of the top of a tea-cup" is roughly 2.5 to 3 inches across — cut slices from the thickest part of the vegetable and trim, or simply use a plain round cutter. Even thickness matters more than even diameter.
- The pan mattersButter a heavy, wide pan so the slices sit in one layer. Add water only to a depth of a few millimetres; this is a braise that should end nearly dry, with the butter and sugars catching lightly on both faces. Too much water and you get boiled slices with no colour.
- TurningThe instruction to turn frequently is the hinge. Sweet potato scorches quickly once the water goes, so keep the heat low and move the slices every few minutes, adding a spoonful of water if the pan runs dry before they are tender.
- The sweetened white sauceA thin milk sauce thickened with a butter-and-flour roux, sugared to taste and flavoured with vanilla, nutmeg or a little brandy. Make it looser than a coating sauce so it pools around the base of the pile rather than setting on it.
- YieldTwo medium sweet potatoes (about 1 lb) give enough rounds for four as a sweet course or three as a side. Serve hot; the sauce skins over as it cools.
The entry reflects the awkward position the sweet potato held in British kitchens at the end of the nineteenth century: an import known chiefly from the West Indies and the American South, sweet enough to want sugar and spice, starchy enough to be treated as a root vegetable. The confusion of names is older than the book — "yam" is generally traced to a West African word carried into English through the Atlantic trade, and at some point it attached itself to the unrelated American Ipomoea. Sweetened white sauce over a cooked vegetable looks odd now, but it belongs to a long English habit of nutmeg-and-sugar treatments for carrots, parsnips and pumpkin, all of which appear in earlier cookery books in much the same dress.