What’s in a pie? History, culture, and a taste of home.
Sweet potato pie is more familiar to people who grew up in the American South than pumpkin pie. Sweet potatoes are also central to Black Southern cuisine; they’re tied up in the history of the slave trade, the yam, and plantation cooks.
Cheyenne Cohen/AP
If you grew up in the northern United States, it’s likely you associate pumpkin pie with Thanksgiving. But travel south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and another orange-colored pie reigns supreme on the holiday table – sweet potato pie.
Historically, pumpkins don’t grow well in the Southern heat. But that’s not the only reason for the absence of pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving was originally perceived as a holiday forced on the South by the victorious North after the Civil War. The arrival of pumpkins was just another pie in the face.
There’s more to the story. Sweet potatoes are also central to Black Southern cuisine; they’re tied up in the history of the slave trade, the yam, and plantation cooks.
Why We Wrote This
Cooking often involves adaptation. Southern cooks evolved recipes for sweet potato pie, while in the North, pumpkin reigned supreme. Now, people are crossing the borders of pie cuisine.
Maia Harrell, who grew up in Georgia, is a self-described pie nerd. She started working in a pie shop in high school, studied the history of Black women and pie-making in graduate school, and then launched her own business, Lord of the Pies.
Today, she makes more than 100 pies a week and sells them at farmers markets around Atlanta. Ms. Harrell, whose family traditions lean more toward cake, didn’t even have her first piece of pumpkin pie until she worked in the pie shop. She found it bland.
“I was raised with ... ‘Black folk don’t eat pumpkin pie’ kind of thing,” she says. “If it’s an orange pie, it’s always sweet potato.”
But something unexpected has been happening when she sets slices of pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie side by side on her table at the farmers markets.
“A lot of Black people would come up to me ... [and say] ‘I know my Black card is going to be revoked, but I prefer pumpkin over sweet potato,’” says Ms. Harrell.
Even more surprising, she says, are her white customers who have never seen a sweet potato pie before. “I got a lot of questions like ... ‘Is it sweet?’ ‘Is it savory?’ I’ve never had to explain to somebody what a sweet potato pie is!” Without fail, she adds, they grew up in the North.
Ms. Harrell sees a culinary challenge in making pumpkin pie more palatable. Earlier this fall she tried something new. She used a golden chai tea blend from a local vendor that has spicy notes from turmeric and black pepper. She set out a few samples recently and her customers gobbled them up.
“Next year, that might just be the pumpkin pie that I make from now on,” she says. That’s in addition to her sweet potato pie, of course, which, with its hints of citrus, sweetness, and caramelized depth, needs no improvement.