Sweet Potato Fries
21/02/13 05:12
We like sweet potatoes at our house. They add color to a meal and have a wonderful flavor. We cook and serve them in a variety of ways. They’re good mashed and baked and they make good French fries, though we usually bake our sweet potato fries instead of deep-frying them because we don’t need the extra calories of fried foods.
The mystery of sweet potatoes for me, however, comes when it is time to buy them. The grocery where we usually shop stocks some form of sweet potato nearly all year round. They sell several different varieties at different times of the year. They come in a variety of skin color from nearly white to brown to red. The color of the flesh inside varies, as well from very light to yellow to orange. Sometimes, however, the store will have no sweet potatoes, and in their place is a bin of yams. Here is where the tricky part comes in. In the United States, most of the yams that are sold are actually sweet potatoes. Confused? Me, too.
Sweet potatoes are members of the morning glory family, Convolvulacea. They are native to Central and South America, but they found their way across the ocean before Europeans found their way to the Americas. Archaeologists have found prehistoric remains of sweet potato in Polynesia from about A.D. 1000 to A.D. 1100, using radiocarbon dating. It is theorized that these came from the western coast of South America, perhaps transported by Polynesian sailors who traveled the oceans long before European ships entered the Pacific.
At any rate, sweet potatoes found their way to Europe with the travels of Captain James Cook, who returned from Polynesia with the food believing that it was unique to Pacific islands.
Yams, on the other hand, come from Africa and Asia and were known in Europe for a long time before anyone there had ever seen a sweet potato. Yams are closely related to lilies. There are over 600 varieties of yams and 95% of these are grown in Africa. Compared to sweet potatoes, yams are starchier and drier. Unless you specifically search for yams, usually found in international markets in the U.S., you are probably eating a sweet potato even though the bin at the grocery store is labeled yams.
I haven’t got a clue as to why Americans call sweet potatoes “yams” on a fairly regular basis.
I’m sure that this is exciting news for those of you who are used to getting up and reading my blog in the morning. You expect to have some pithy bit of theology or perhaps a report of a personal experience, though regular readers of my blog know that the topics are so varied, it is difficult to predict what the day’s story might bring.
But there is more to the story than vegetables. Archaeologists now believe that Polynesian travelers didn’t just visit South America and sail away with sweet potatoes. There is now some evidence that they may have introduced chickens to the continent. Among Central and South American archaeologists, this is a matter of considerable controversy. It is possible that Columbus was the one to introduce chickens to the continent. After all his voyages did a lot of moving food from one part of the world to another. Columbus and his European compatriots are responsible for bringing tomatoes to Europe. These days we can’t imagine Italian cooking without tomatoes. They also brought chili peppers back to the continent and the peppers made their way from Europe to Asia. Which is a good thing, because peppers seem like essential ingredients in much of Chinese cooking.
Chickens in South America, however are a bit of a mystery. Some Archaeologists claim that they have found evidence of chickens in Western Peru that predates the arrival of Columbus. Unlike sweet potatoes in Polynesia, however, the evidence of chickens is much closer to the date of the arrival of Columbus – close enough that other archaeologists question the claims that the chickens got here first.
It begs the question, which came first, the chicken or Columbus?
I know you would like to have this resolved before the end of the blog so that you can get on with your day.
What I find interesting is how much food from one part of the world has travelled to another part of the world. We are told that eating local is good for the planet. The less foods are traveled, the less energy is used. But eating local is a bit of a challenge in any location. Because we humans have been transporting food form one place to another for as long as we have been traveling. And we have transplanted foods from one part of the world to another on a regular basis.
Charles C. Mann, author of the book, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” is pretty excited about the contact between Polynesians and people in South America before the voyages of Columbus. “It would be a mind-boggling voyage,” he says. “Suppose you started some place in Easter island. It’s incredible to think that you could go all the way to South America. This is scurvy time. It’s a long journey and incredibly dangerous. You’d have to be completely insane – which people are.”
I’m not qualified to comment on the mental health of Polynesian sailors who plied the waters over a millennium ago. They were probably incredibly brave. They were probably incredibly intelligent. They may have employed technologies of sailing and navigation that we had previously thought did not exist at that time. They were likely among the most advanced people of the world for their time.
One wonders, however, if they had already tasted yams. The starchy plants have their own flavor, but it is a bit of an acquired taste. Pacific Islanders, however, claim to enjoy eating Poi – a thick pasty mush made from the Taro plant in Hawaii. Hawaiian poi is rather bland compared with the sweet pudding served as Tahitian po’e or the creamy desert of bananas and coconut served in Samoa. I’ve never figured out whether Hawaiians really like their poi, or if they just serve it to tourists for the entertainment of watching their reaction to the stuff.
At any rate, if you had been living on a diet of poi, you might well be willing to do something truly crazy for the taste of sweet potato fries. Those ancient mariners might have discovered that it was well worth the long trip.