Category: Yam Lore

• Sweet potatoes are fried in bacon drippings and eaten w/ bacon on toast. traditional autumn breakfast food in Kentucky.
• Americans consume almost 5 pounds of sweet potatoes per person per year.
• Vardaman, Mississippi claims to be the Sweet Potato Capital of the World and holds the National Sweet Potato Festival every November.
• Did you know? November is Sweet Potato Month in North Carolina

• Sweet potatoes are as American as apple pie, and even more so. Native Americans were already growing Sweet Potatoes when Columbus came to these shores in 1492

• George Washington Carver developed 118 different products from sweet potato, including sizing for cotton fabrics, mucilage for postal stamps, and an alternative to corn syrup.

• Peruvian cave relics suggest sweet potatoes eaten 10000 years ago. Central America, domesticated 5000 years ago. However, us yams can never be tamed.

Did you know? The word yam comes from African words njam, nyami, or djambi, meaning “to eat,” and was first recorded in America in 1676.

Some other names for the sweet potato are: Batata, papata, camote, kumar, kumara, uala, kaukau, murasake imo, satsumaimo, beni imo, yamaimo, hongshu, ganshu, ubi jalar, ratala, kanhamula, bathala, khoai lang, kamote, goguma, ngwaci and boniato.

Now that’s a mouthful…. We’ll just stick with yam.

The biggest question we get asked other than “Why can I not stop eating Bruce’s Yams?” is, “Why are they called yams if they are sweet potatoes, aren’t yams completely different than sweet potatoes?” Don’t grab the aspirin just yet, we can give you the lowdown on who is the uber tuber.

Bruce’s Yams are Sweet Potatoes…. There, now that’s that out of the way, let’s tell you why we are called yams. Africans in Louisiana used to call Sweet Potatoes “yams” because they resembled native tuberous vegetables, can you guess what that is? That’s the real yam.

Still confused? The yams they were referring to are larger, starchier tuberous vegetables, usually white or purple fleshed. Our yams are sweet potatoes, with softer, sweeter orange flesh and honestly, we think we have much more personality. Those other yams aren’t much of a party animal, not too tasty with marshmallows.

That’s the truth, the whole truth, yam nothing but the truth.