The sweet potato investigation

My whole life is a lie

Absolutely legendary in my family is a holiday dish called sweet potato pone which my mother retrieved long ago from a cookbook called the African Heritage cookbook. Nobody dislikes this dish. NOBODY. This dish has even converted many a “yam-hater” into a lover of the sweet potato. My kids insist on it every. single. year.

The dish consists of a sweet potato, some binding/liquid ingredients such as eggs and milk, sweeteners of maple syrup and sugar, and spices: nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and allspice. Walnuts if you feel like it. Not at all like corn pone, which you may have encountered, it is baked in a square dish and the consistency is thicker than pudding but more uniform and creamier than a typical casserole. You can eat it with fork or spoon and it is delicious on the reheat.

This is the very cookbook. You can’t buy it anywhere.

Sweet potato pone has nothing in common with the dish called “candied yams / with marshmallows.” So when people say “I hate yams” and refuse to try this dish, they are truly missing something not at all like what they claim to hate.

You may have noticed I’ve been using yams and sweet potatoes interchangeably thus far, and perhaps my lack of commitment has irked you. I want you to know that the yam vs sweet potato debate has long irked me so I’m here to report on my personal investigations regarding these seemingly-similar ingredients.

When you visit the market you may notice two bins: one for yams and one for sweet potatoes. Last year’s photo-research project revealed that nobody knows what is what. Aside from the top left, where the produce guy said “fuck it” and just put all the words on the label in no particular order, each of these images indicates that yams are orange-r and sweet potatoes are lighter.

But when you look it up on the internet, conflicting information emerges! Do an image search for yams vs. sweet potatoes and you will find that most places indicate the opposite of those pictures above. Yams are light, sweet potatoes are orange/dark.

Forget the pictures. Read up. Here’s a great site, which I sure hope got the story straight because this shit is revelatory. First factoid, a yam is a tuber while a sweet potato is a root and these plants are not related at all. (!) More importantly, the orange sweet potato in those internet images you found was cultivated in the 1930s in Louisiana and named a yam:

In order to differentiate it from the sweet potatoes that already existed (smaller, drier and with white or yellowish flesh), sweet potato growers decided to call the new variety a yam—a word that is rooted in the West African words nyam, nyami or enyame, which mean "to eat." Communities of enslaved Africans were the first to refer to the sweet potato as a yam, as it reminded them of the ones they ate in Africa.

Today, USDA regulations require yam labels¹ to be followed by the term "sweet potatoes" when they are technically (and biologically) not yams.

This controversy is fraught. And personal. My mom and I appear to have the same conversation every year when I start asking questions about sweet potatoes and why my sweet potato pone is so light when hers is nearly orange. I diligently buy what is marked in the store as sweet potatoes, or if they’ve got it marked “wrong” I buy the lighter thing. My whole life experience and observation in my mother’s kitchen, namely that she buys light-colored sweet potatoes in the grocery store, underpins my belief about what is a sweet potato.²

Confused, again this year I initiated the questions regarding the pone. My memory must be terrible as I can never manage to recall what she says so I ask again. And this…this year’s conversation exploded my universe.

My whole life has been a lie.

Climate change is wrecking the world, AI is stealing humanity, and my mom buys yams. In the days ahead, I’ll need to readjust the expectations I have for this life. For now, the sweet potato pone in my fridge will sustain my spirits.³

Sweet Potato Pone
1 large cooked sweet potato (bake 1 hour at 400º)
1/4 C melted butter
2 eggs, mixed well
1/3 C maple or corn syrup
1/3 C milk
1/3 C white sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 C chopped walnuts if desired. I hear you can also use raisins.

Mix all ingredients (be careful not to accidentally cook the eggs with hot butter and/or potato) and pour into greased 9" square baking dish. Bake 1 hour at 350º. 

1. Specifically I think they mean cans of yams, not what you find in the produce section.

2. The internet image search I recommended above largely disagrees with me but there was no internet in my youth so I disregard those irrelevant images.

3. Update from Thanksgiving Dinner Night: the kids ate it all. Come for me now, Satan. I’m ready.