Thanksgiving Recipes: Candied Yams

Here is the first in a series of traditional American foods, often served at Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other fall roast dinners.

Candied Yams or candied sweet potatoes:

This is a pretty sweet dish, but it is not a dessert. It is probably best served with a mix of other more savory and less sweet side dishes and a good course of roast meat, like turkey, chicken, turkey, goose, or pork.

Ingredients:

Three big yams,
brown sugar
butter
mixed spice (a mix of ground cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg)
salt and pepper to taste

Begin by washing the yams, but do not peel them. Cut each yam in half, or in thirds, whichever is required to fit them into a pot of cold water. Bring the water to boil. Let the yams boil until they have softened, and a metal spoon can be pushed into the yams without difficulty. Now drain the pot, and put in cold water. Let the yams cool before working with them further. Drain the pot again and replace with cold water a second time to speed the cooling process if necessary.

Now take the yams out of the cold water and take off their skins. They should come off pretty easily just using your fingers. Now take the skinned yams and cut them into slices about 1/2 centimeter thick. To make it look pretty, arrange them in an medium sized baking dish as follows. Put one row of slices down, then overlap the next row of slices over the first. Keep overlapping like this until the whole baking dish is filled. Now put a little salt and pepper over the yams. Next put just a light dusting of the mixed spice. Then put on plenty of brown sugar over all the yams. Some people like it more or less sweet, so use your judgment, but generally Americans like this pretty sweet. Then put bits of butter over the brown sugar. You need enough butter on the yams so that when it melts, it will coat all of them and mix with the brown sugar.

Now put the whole thing in the oven for about half an hour or so at about 180 Degrees Celsius. The temperature and time don't need to be too precise because the yams are already cooked.

Well I hope some of you get the chance to try this. It really is one of my favorites.

Once more into the breach,

Ben