“As kids, my sister Althea and I spent our summers either in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with my dad’s parents, who traveled up from North Carolina during the Great Migration, or we headed south to Opa-locka, Florida, where my mother’s father moved after her mother died. Whenever we rolled into the Moorish-style city of Opa-locka, Grandpa Arthur and Grandma Viola would have a big old pot of candied sweet potatoes and another pot full of rice ready and waiting — the Geechee comfort food!”1
Matthew Raiford
Ingredients
1 cup cold salted butter (2 sticks), cut into pieces
4 pounds sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
3 1/2 cups freshly squeezed orange or satsuma juice
2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup cornstarch, more if needed
Instructions
In a stock pot large enough to hold the sweet potatoes, melt the butter over medium-high heat and stir until the butter starts to brown. Add the sweet potato rounds and coat with the brown butter. Cook for 5 minutes.
Combine 3 cups of the orange juice (reserving a half cup) with the brown sugar in a medium bowl and stir until the sugar starts to dissolve. Pour the mixture into the pot with the sweet potatoes and stir. Allow the liquid to come to a boil, and then turn the heat down to a simmer and let cook for 15 minutes.
Test the sweet potatoes for doneness by piercing with a fork to see if they are tender. If they resist, they are not ready, and you will need to let them cook another 5 minutes. Repeat until they pass the fork-tender test.
Mix the reserved 1/2 cup of orange juice with the cornstarch and stir until the mixture is combined and feels silky. (If mixture doesn’t feel silky, add 1 tablespoon of cornstarch at a time until the mixture achieves the desired consistency.)
Pour half of the cornstarch mixture into the candied yams and stir. Cook another minute, then add the remaining mixture. The sauce should thicken and coat the sweet potatoes.
Serves 8 to 12
Sweet Potatoes are Not Yams
Matthew Raiford follows this recipe with a page devoted to the difference between sweet potatoes and yams, and is able to clear things up pretty effectively:
“In the United States, we constantly confuse sweet potatoes and yams, even though they are two completely different root vegetables with different histories. Copper-colored or purple-fleshed sweet potatoes arrived in North America from South America. They are chock-full of beta-carotene. Yams, however, are essential to West African cooking traditions. Full of potassium, they have a starchy white, yellow, or rose-colored and are covered in a brown, bark-like skin.
Slave traders carried yams in their ships, and even called the tubers by the West African word nyam, which means “eat.” But when my ancestors arrived on these shores, sweet potatoes were the closest thing they had to the cornerstone of their cooking, and they became the substitute for the yam.
If you can find a true yam, try substituting it for any of these recipes that call for sweet potatoes. You will discover a much subtler flavor and a more robust texture that is more authentic to African foodways.”2
Matthew Raiford
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Footnotes
- Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, “Grandpa Arthur’s Citrus-Candied Sweet Potatoes,” in Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 68. Available here.
- Ibid, 69.