OK... make sure we're talking the same tubers.
Yams are African... .a kind of starchy white thing you see in ethnic stores. Thick earthy looking buggers. But not to be confused with Cbuttava.... or even Eddoes...
Sweet potatoes (Ipomoea batata) are different; they are sweet potatoes, possibly the first potatoes that got to England but that's debatable.... or potatable.
They are tapered smooth skinned clean things either white fleshed or orange fleshed. If you have doubt, surrepbreastiously scrape the thin skin with a fingernail when the greengrocer isn't looking. Many of the orange fleshed ones in the UK hail from Israel. Cooking-wise they aren't a lot different, so if you got something white fleshed and it turrned out starchily nasty, either you got the wrong "Yam" or the wrong recipe...;)
Africans took Real yams to the New World but ended up calling Sweet Potatoes yams because they were the nearest thing to what they knew, and hence blessed us with a sweet confusion.
Yams 415On Sun 27 Nov 2005 03:44:07p, Thus Spake Zarathustra, or was it Ian Northeast? If you don't mind the effort and time...
If you want to know how to cook Yams, ask an African....
if you want to know how to cook a sweet potato, ask someone from the New World. But beware... they aren't content with the natural sweetness, they often like to add brown sugar and marshmallows as well... *blech*
