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To Cook Yams

A dish of boiled and roasted yams filled with a thick peppery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Yam and pepper work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 111 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Cook Yams

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the yams

  1. Boil the yams for 2 hours.

  2. Roast the yams for 2 hours.

  3. Cut the yams in half and scoop out the insides.

  4. Pass the insides through a sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the sieved yam flesh with pepper, coarse sea salt, cayenne, and cream until it reaches a thick sauce consistency.

  2. Heat the mixture in a pan on the fire.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the yam skins with the mixture.

  2. Keep very hot and serve.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Yam + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together111 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Yam + creamtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Yams
Starchy flesh that softens with cooking and becomes the body of the filling once mashed and sieved.
Cream
Adds fat and moisture, giving the filling a smooth, rich texture and a looser sauce consistency.

The step that matters

Keep very hot and serve. Cream and starch thicken and firm as the filling cools, so it can turn stiff and lose its smooth sauce texture. Serving it while still hot keeps it soft and spoonable.

Swap the yam

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, cream):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Yamthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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