Oh, fine, I’m an idiot. Just in time for what promises to be gloomy and lonely Thanksgiving, I learn that all these many moons I have thought yams and sweet potatoes are the same vegetable. It turns out that they are not; they aren’t even related. The reason is flat-out multi-continental language malpractice.
No wonder nobody seems to know this: here’s the explanation that Food Channel expert Alton Brown unearthed in a video posted here. Let me try to summarize:
Sweet potatoes are not merely potatoes that happen to be sweet. They are actually the root of a vine in the morning glory family, and morning glories are a kind of lily. Christopher Columbus brought some back to Spain in 1493; they were called “batatas” by the Indians who lived in the Greater Antilles Islands. The Spanish called them “patatas.” Here’s Fred and Ginger performing a Gershwin song about such matters…
Where was I? Oh, right, sweet potatoes…The Spanish king served a sweet potato pie to King Henry VIII at some royal event and he loved it (of course, he loved just about anything he could put in his mouth) , he took some vines back to England. There patatas became “potatoes.” (Cue that song again…).
200 years later, the Irish immigrants started arriving with white potatoes. To avoid confusion between those potatoes and what Henry the Eighth had eaten, some Louisiana farmers developed an orange variety, and those were quickly dubbed “sweet potatoes.” “Yam” was already Southern slang for this vegetable because slaves who were brought (and bought) from West Africa found them similar to the vegetable they called “yams” back home, so they called these things “yams” too. It was a nostalgia thing.
I’ll have to read that a couple of times to figure out what I just explained. The main point is this: in the United States, sweet potatoes are called “yams” and “sweet potatoes” interchangeably. Etymologically, the words describe the same food, at least here. But “yam” properly refers to a nyami, African yams or Nigerian yams, also called true yams, Ghana yams, puna yams or white yams. African yams have thick, brown, bark-like skin and are yellow.They also big: some weigh over 55 pounds. True yams have a texture similar to yucca.
Never mind: in grocery stores, sweet potatoes are consistently labeled “yams.” All the recipes I checked for “candied yams” begin “candied yams are sweet potatoes tossed in brown sugar,” but Google’s AI chatbot will give you contradictory answers to the question, “What are candied yams?” The whole mess evokes the famous dialogue between Alice and the White Knight in “Through the Looking Glass”:
Alice was walking beside the White Knight in Looking Glass Land.
“You are sad.” the Knight said in an anxious tone. “Let me sing you a song to comfort you….The name of the song is called ‘Haddocks’ Eyes.’“
“Oh, that’s the name of the song, is it?” Alice said, trying to feel interested.
“No, you don’t understand,” the Knight said, looking a little vexed. “That’s what the name is called. The name really is ‘The Aged, Aged Man.'”
“Then I ought to have said ‘That’s what the song is called’?” Alice corrected herself.
“No you oughtn’t: that’s another thing. The song is called ‘Ways and Means’ but that’s only what it’s called, you know!”
“Well, what is the song then?” said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
“I was coming to that,” the Knight said. “The song really is ‘A-sitting On a Gate’….”
Well, at least I finally know the difference. Sweet potatoes are sweet potatoes, but are called yams, and real yams are yams, and are called yams too.
Good job, everybody.
Ethics Alarms 
Cue Popeye: “I yam what I yam, and that’s alls that I yam….”
Shame on you!
OB barely edged me out on that there…
Anywho, we call ’em Sweet Spuds; nothing in the vegetable world/tuber division (IMO) harder when raw (they once broke a steel fry cutter blade) and nothing softer when cooked.
If you ever want to try a different way to counteract their natural sweetness, nuke ’em 2 minutes each side, cut’em into half wedges (or “steaks”) spray both sides with EVOO, season to taste (we use Garlic Pepper), and bake on oiled pan @430° for ~ 30 minutes, turning the pan @~20 minutes.
PWS
Bad impulse control.
The sweet potato vs yam controversy rages on! Many people insist on calling them yams, even after they know better. We grew sweet potatoes every year on our farm, and my mother told me about the difference between them and yams when I was but a lad. My grandmother made the best candied sweet potatoes I ever tasted, but we never called them yams -although others did. I had never seen an actual African yam until I visited a gourmet market many years later, where they sold big chunks of yam that weighed about five pounds each. I didn’t care for their texture although they tasted okay. I grow the orange variety of sweet potatoes every year and eat them regularly. (I no longer eat white potatoes.) This year I also grew some purple sweet potatoes that were quite lacking in flavor compared to the orange variety. I have also seen, but never tasted, white-fleshed sweet potatoes.
Across the South, the “sweet potato vs pumpkin pie” debate also arises every year about this time; I prefer sweet potato while my wife prefers pumpkin. My wife also makes a tasty sweet potato casserole. I never heard either of those dishes called “yam pie” or “yam casserole.”
Taking a cue from Mr. Lincoln, calling a sweet potato a yam doesn’t make it yam.
Potatoes are not from Ireland. They are from the New World. Potatoes exit natively from Mexico to South America. Most of the potatoes we have today seem to come from the Andes.
Yep. And the variety of potato that became blighted and caused the Great Famine was a single variety. The Brits could have introduced a different variety from the New World which would have been resistant to the blight, but they chose not to. Genocide.
Whenever I see people trying to import new potato plants from Mexico, I am reminded of the blight. A lot of our potato industry is pretty genetically homogeneous. If we get a new blight from one of these imports, we are in trouble.
Doesn’t the Dept. of Ag. inspect plants at the border? California purports to inspect for plants and bugs on I-10 at its border with Arizona. Which I’ve always thought to be pretty funny.
Funny, the same confusion exists in Spanish (and has existed since I have memory). Camotes (candied yams, but sometimes just the vegetable itself) are made with ñames (yam, the actual vegetable) but also sometimes with batatas (sweet potatoes) not to be confused with patatas or papas (potatoes). Adding to the confusion the variety of sweet potato used for candied yams is also labeled camote (yam) at the supermarket, and actual ñames (yams) are somewhat hard to come by.
It all makes me want to scream “potatoe”!
This sent my mind back to some of the problems I had to unravel in the five-credit physics class I was (but should not have been) forced to take as part of my computer science curriculum. I passed the class…and that’s all I’m going to say about it.
I will protest the language mess by passing on both yams and sweet potatoes, which is pretty easy since I don’t really like either. But now that physics memory has taken me to a dark place. A double-chocolate brownie bite drizzled with caramel might help…
I’m with you…physics (yikes), sweet potatoes and yams (yuck), and don’t hate me but I’m currently popping a deliciously soft, sweet & lush double chocolate brownie bite in my mouth right now (yum)! 😀 Happy early Thanksgiving, all! And Jack: many thanks for the fascinating food and etymology lesson!
Heathen! Must share with us!
jvb
I’m surprised you don’t hate that song because of the contrived pronunciation forced into the lyrics. Nobody says “po-TAH-to”.
Oh, and in spite of various celebratory seasonal songs, sweet potato pie is vastly superior to pumpkin pie.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
I give you the White Knight, and you come back with Humpty Dumpty!
That’s, my friend, is an abomination. My mom tricked me with sweet potato pie disguised se pumpkin. I haven’t spoken to her in decades!
jvb
That’s a shame; I have no certain explanation for such a bizarre occurrence. My best guesses are that you have been possessed by Satan and turned away from all good things, or that your mother is from a part of the country ( generally, the northeast… Italians excepted) where such things as black pepper and brown sugar are considered exotic condiments, and the pie was subsequently grossly sub-par.
At least potatoes and sweet potatoes are in the same Order…