Most likely theyams you eat this Thanksgiving aren’t yams at all, butsweet potatoes. The two are different plants, not even closely related, yetthey’re often confused. Yams are members of the genusDioscorea and are in their own special family,Dioscoreaceae. Sweet potatoes come from the speciesIpomoea batatas, in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae. Why the confusion? Enslaved Africans in the U.S. referred to sweet potatoes as “yams” because of their similarity to the true yams of their home continent, and the name stuck.

Each year more than a half million tons ofcranberries are produced between the United States and Canada, accounting for much of the world’s supply. A cranberry bed is often called a bog, despite the fact that for most of the year, the cranberries grow on dry land. But dikes are constructed around the bog toenable controlled flooding. When the plants go dormant in winter, flooding protects the vines from freezing. It takes three to five years for a cranberry bedto begin producing commercially.

Ifturkey wasn’t served at the first Thanksgiving, how did it become synonymous with the holiday? Some people have creditedCharles Dickens’sA Christmas Carol (1843) with bolstering the idea of turkey as a holiday meal. But in her 1827 novelNorthwood,Sarah Josepha Hale devoted an entire chapter to a description of aNew England Thanksgiving, with a roasted turkey “placed at the head of the table.”