At DC Sweet Potato Cake, we use sweet potatoes and sugar as our foundation. Most people taste comfort and few people pause long enough to consider how those two ingredients became staples in American desserts.

During the Middle Passage, enslaved Africans were given yams as part of minimal rations that were fed to them not for nourishment, but more so survival. When enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas, they encountered sweet potatoes. Different crop. Similar texture. Similar purpose.