Home › Cookery › To Dress Yams
To Dress Yams
Steam them till done, peel and slice them. Put in a buttered baking-dish a layer of yam, on which put sugar and some lumps of butter. Fill up the dish in this way, and when full, pour over it milk or cream, and bake brown.--Mrs. Dr.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in nineteenth-century American cookbooks: proportions are left to the cook. The one thing worth fixing before you start is what "yam" means here.
- Yam means sweet potatoIn Virginia in this period "yam" is the sweet potato, not the starchy West African true yam sold in Caribbean and African markets. Use about 3 lb of sweet potatoes for a 2-quart dish; true yams are drier and blander and will not sweeten the same way.
- Steam whole and unpeeledWhole medium sweet potatoes take 30-45 minutes in a steamer basket, until a skewer meets no resistance at the center. Skins slip off easily while they are still warm, and steaming keeps the flesh from waterlogging as boiling can.
- Slice thicknessAbout half an inch. Thinner slices collapse into a single mass under the milk; much thicker and the sugar and butter never reach the middle.
- Proportions the recipe omitsFor 3 lb of sliced sweet potato, figure roughly 1/2 cup sugar and 4 tablespoons butter distributed over three or four layers, and 3/4 to 1 cup of milk or cream poured over at the end. Brown sugar suits the dish better than white and is period-appropriate.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes, uncovered, until the liquid has thickened around the edges and the top has taken color. "Bake brown" is the only doneness cue given, and it is the right one -- the potatoes are already cooked.
- Pour the milk down the sideAdding it over the top washes the sugar off the uppermost layer and leaves it pale. Tip the dish slightly and pour at the edge so the liquid rises through the layers.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a side dish. It reheats well and is better the second day, once the milk and sugar have set into the potato.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, who are credited by name or, as here, by a partial signature such as "Mrs. Dr.", treats the sweet potato as an everyday staple rather than a holiday novelty. Sweet potatoes grew reliably in Virginia's sandy coastal soils and stored through the winter in earth banks or cellars, which made them one of the few sweet vegetables available in quantity to ordinary households. The persistent American habit of calling them yams is generally traced to enslaved West Africans, who applied a familiar name from home to an unfamiliar but comparable root; the usage stuck in the South and was later cemented by twentieth-century marketing. This layered, sugared, cream-covered treatment is a forerunner of the candied sweet potato casseroles that still appear on Southern holiday tables, minus the marshmallows, which arrived decades later.