Thanksgiving Candied Yams

"When recipes are passed down from generation to generation, I find in my little family that we expect certain things—we expect the Waldorf salad, and we expect the Greek feta salad that has nothing to do with any ethnicity in our personal lives. I had a great aunt and she was pretty much a grandmother to me, and she was WWII bride, and she never changed her hairstyle from that period, and she always had this huge sweet tooth. She made these brilliant candied yams out of the can. They’d just get a little burnt on the bottom, and every Thanksgiving, no matter where I lived, I would call her and I’d say ‘Barbara, would you . . . tell me how to do the yams. I’ve got the yams here, and I really don’t know how to make them, so could you tell me?’ And, we would have this conversation every Thanksgiving, and she would tell me how to make the Bothman memorial yams. And, to this day, my family still fights over them. And though she is long gone, I’m afraid the yams live on. "

Asset ID #7508