Today I wanted to discuss the humble sweet potato. Or is it the unpretentious yam? Tasty and versatile, regardless of which plant, but the task of discussing this food item became formidable when I realized that, like trills, mordents, and flattements, sweet potatoes and yams are completely different plants. How different? Well, to begin, they are not even distantly related. Yams are from the dioscoreaceae family, and sweet potatoes are from the convolvulacea family. Read the details here. Who knew? Well, at one level we all knew there was at least a small difference, based on the appearance. And we're all in agreement on their tastiness and the health and nutritional benefits from eating them.
In order to eat them, they need to be cooked (although I have given raw, chopped yams to my dogs, as part of their whole and raw food diet; I usually give them cooked and diced along with their raw meat, but that's another discussion for another time). The first time I ever cooked a sweet potato/yam, was when my wife and I were dating. Astounding, I know, that until that time I had never cooked a sweet potato/yam thing in my life. So I asked her, and I don't remember what she said, but it involved a slight scoring/poking holes with a fork, the oven at a particular temperature, and put them on a baking sheet for a prescribed amount of time.
When I recently decided to cook a couple of YAMS as ingredients for my wife's special creation of black bean and sweet potato enchiladas (or, the non-vegan option of adding goat cheese crumbles to the mix), I couldn't remember either the temperature or time so I went to our formidable, no enviable, collection of cookbooks. I consulted Mark Bittman's invaluable How to Cook Everything, the Moskowitz & Romero notable work Veganomicon, the venerable Laurel's Kitchen, and the classic Joy of Cooking. How could I go wrong following the instructions of these landmark works? After reading them, the question became: How could I go right? They were all different! They were all different on temperature, time, cooking vessel, and preparation. OK, so do these over-hyped, under-done, half-baked cookbooks actually know anything? Oh, wait. Right. The reason they are invaluable, notable, venerable, and classic is because they actually DO know something. That's why we bought them, use them all the time, and each book bears the mark of a wanna-be chef's kitchen (they are all soiled with food, sauces, water stains, and who knows what else).
OK, now what? This all seemed familiar, not just in a déjà vu kind of way but in a ripple-in-the-space-time- continuum kind of way. Continuum, basso continuo. Of course. I needed to look at this through an historical performance practice lens.But what types of treatises was I looking at? Vocal? Continuo? Instrument-specific tutors? It didn't matter. All the books were telling me what they needed to, and my task was to collect the information, mentally collate it into some order, or categorize different parts of it, and then ignore what the authorities said and make my own interpretation, based on historical models, of course. I was interpreting an event in much the same way as I interpret a piece of music as I prepare for a concert. And the same things that go into concert prep are what goes into food prep. Over time cooks and flute players acquire a base of knowledge through experience that allow them to make decisions in real time ("on the fly," in the vernacular) during their respective performance processes.
I don't remember exactly what I did with the yams (or were they sweet potatoes?), but the end result was just what I needed. And I'll probably do it differently the next time, just as each time I perform the Siciliano of BWV 1035, or the opening of TWV 40:2. It will be a brand new performance, reminiscent of the earlier versions, yet unique. Kind of like the similarities and differences between yams and sweet potatoes.