Here’s the thing with sweet potatoes, they pair beautifully with oranges and holiday spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg. My father first came upon this idea in an old issue of Bon Appetit. The recipe includes grated orange peel, lemon juice, and the spices you would normally find in hot mulled cider. We’ve reduced the sugar from the original recipe, and added some salt and pepper. The spices give the yams a wonderfully festive holiday accent! Why do we call sweet potatoes yams? Somewhere around the 1930s, Louisiana sweet potato growers began marketing their sweet potatoes as yams to make them stand out from other sweet potatoes. Growers probably chose the name because the two tubers were already confused. Yams are an important food in Africa, and slave traders used sweet potatoes as food for their captives. Enslaved Africans called them yams since they looked similar to the food they knew. People interchanged the terms for centuries before growers marketed sweet potatoes as yams.
More Classic Thanksgiving Side Dishes
Perfect Mashed Potatoes Cranberry Sauce Roasted Parsnips Classic Glazed Carrots Green Bean Casserole From Scratch
If you don’t have a fresh orange for the zest, you can stir in a little orange juice instead. Put the potatoes on a foil-lined roasting pan or thick, rimmed baking sheet. Bake until the sweet potatoes are completely tender, about 50 minutes to an hour or more. Remove from oven and let sit until cool enough to touch. Use an electric mixer (or by hand with strong arms) to beat the sweet potatoes until they are completely smooth. Sprinkle with a little ground black pepper to taste. Then taste! (But don’t eat them all, even though you will be tempted.)
