Sweet Potato

The sweet potato (*Ipomoea batatas*) is not a yam (*Dioscorea* spp.), but in the African American culinary tradition, the two are inseparable in memory. Enslaved Africans in the Americas encountered the sweet potato — a New World crop — and recognised it as a functional equivalent of the West African yam that had been central to their food culture. The word "yam" in African American usage almost always refers to the orange-fleshed sweet potato, and the cultural weight attached to it — the sweet potato pie at Thanksgiving, the candied yams at Sunday dinner, the baked sweet potato as daily food — is the weight of the African yam tradition transferred to a New World plant. Michael Twitty in *The Cooking Gene* traces this substitution explicitly: the sweet potato filled the yam-shaped hole in the diasporic food memory.

The sweet potato in the African American tradition appears in four primary forms: baked (whole, in its skin, until the sugars caramelise and the flesh is creamy), candied (peeled, sliced, baked in butter, brown sugar, and spices until glazed), in sweet potato pie (a custard pie using mashed sweet potato as the base — the Thanksgiving dessert that is not pumpkin pie), and mashed (with butter, cream, and spices). Each form transforms the same ingredient through a different technique, and each carries cultural significance beyond its recipe.

Candied yams sit alongside fried chicken, collard greens, cornbread, and mac and cheese on the soul food plate. Sweet potato pie is the Thanksgiving and Christmas dessert. Baked sweet potato is an everyday food with butter, salt, and pepper. The sweet potato's natural sweetness makes it one of the few vegetables that bridges savoury and sweet applications.