Pumpkin pie or sweet potato? How Two Pies Shared Our Thanksgiving Tables

CNN
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Debra Freeman is not a big pie person. But if she had to choose between sweet potato and pumpkin — the two fall pies that have come to define the Thanksgiving season — the choice is simple: Sweet potato.

“Being from the South,” Freeman, a food historian, told CNN, “I think I’m legally bound.”

For her, it’s not so much a matter of taste. She thinks back to her grandmother, who learned the recipe from her grandmother before her, and so on. Sweet potato pie was always the dessert on their holiday table.

“Pumpkin was never thought of,” Freeman said. “I literally didn’t know about pumpkin pie until high school.”

These days, it’s almost impossible to escape the pumpkin mania that accompanies the first yellowing leaf. From our coffee to our candles, the spicy aroma has infiltrated our culture. But in many homes, especially African-American ones, sweet potato pie remains supreme.

Although they have their nuances, the two types of pies are not that different: Both have a sweet, custard filling, warm spiced and held by the flaky pastry. Sweet potato might be a little sweeter; pumpkin a little more spicy.

But which one is really the best pie? It’s a very contentious debate – one that perhaps mainly comes down to where you were born.

It’s easy to simplify the debate as black (sweet potato) versus white (pumpkin). But the actual story behind the two holiday staples is less pretty.

Thanksgiving as we know it today is a relatively new holiday. Suggested by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War as a way to unify the country, it did not become a national holiday until 1941, just before Freeman’s mother was born. The delay was in part due to Southern backlash, which saw the holiday as a way for the North to convey its ideals to the South, Freeman said.

Pumpkin pie then became a symbol of these northern ideals. Sarah Josepha Hale, an activist and abolitionist, pushed Lincoln to begin the Thanksgiving tradition and wrote about the holiday in her 1827 book, “Northwood: A Tale of New England.”

In his book, Hale paints a delicious scene: A roast turkey at the head of the table, savory stuffing, “a sirloin of beef” and two pies, chicken and pumpkin, both an “indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.”

Thanks to this book, pumpkin pie was seen as a highlight of a Thanksgiving feast even before the holiday was celebrated nationally, Freeman said. It thus became an abolitionist symbol of Northern ideals. To this day, it remains a popular choice for many Americans.

Sarah O’Brien is the founder of the local bakery chain Little Tart Bakeshop in Atlanta. Although O’Brien has lived in the South for more than a decade, the bakery offers pre-holiday pumpkin pie instead of sweet potato. It is now the store’s best-selling Thanksgiving pie.

“When I started making pies at Little Tart 13 years ago, I was making what I grew up eating for the holidays in Ohio,” O’Brien told CNN. “I guess I never thought of it as a question of pumpkin vs. sweet potato in the baker; I just started making a pumpkin pie I’m proud of and people enjoyed it.”

Neither pumpkins nor sweet potatoes are naturally native to the United States, nor are they necessarily native to white or black cultures, said KC Hysmith, a food scientist. Sweet potatoes had already been brought back to Europe from Central and South America by Christopher Columbus and had reached England in the 16th century – even mentioned as Aphrodisiac by Shakespeare. They were then brought up to New England in the 18th century.

Even our pie-making custom was typical of 17th- and 18th-century England, Hysmith said. And of course the spices and sugar were products of the spice trade.

“So we have this division that, if you trace it back far enough, is not a division,” Hysmith said. “It’s these two pies that are these wild amalgamations of globalization and colonization.”

In the South, sweet potatoes became an important crop – North Carolina is still the leading producer of sweet potatoesfollowed by California and Mississippi.

Because sweet potatoes were more common in the South than pumpkins, they were used as fillings for pies, an upper-class English custom imitated by colonists in the state, historian Adrian Miller wrote in “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine.”

This means that cooks in the South, often slaves, were the ones who actually did the preparation. And sweet potatoes were reminiscent of the yams native to West Africa, where many slaves came from. This abundance of sweet potatoes, both in pastry and other forms, led to sweet potato pie entering the soul food canon.

The importance of sweet potato pie to African Americans has continued through the generations. Culinary historian Michael Twitty grows his own sweet potatoes for his pie, an unbroken family tradition that dates back to at least the 18th century, he told CNN. They never had pumpkin pie, he said.

In the 1930s, George Washington Carver, famous for his peanut butter, circulated a double-crust sweet potato pie recipe in his Agricultural Bulletin, Miller wrote, reviving its popularity. A few decades later, Georgia Gilmore sold sweet potato pies and other food to help fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Even more recently, after the killing of Michael Brown, baker Rose McGee brought 30 sweet potato pies to Ferguson, Missouri to feed the affected community.

“The sweet potato pie has been one of the healing factors for me,” McGee, who lives in Minnesota, told Twin Cities PBS earlier this year. “I just know that there is power in it. I know it means so much when people are able to get a piece of that and it takes them into memories of happier places.”

Now the distinction between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie is coming down to tradition, Freeman said. For some, pumpkin pie is the most important and any other choice would be sacrilege. For others, like Freeman, anything short of sweet potato pie would be unheard of. These Thanksgiving pies, like the holiday itself, are more about nostalgia than anything else.

Either way, both pies are the most American things you can eat, said Hysmith, who — for what it’s worth — grew up in a white family eating pumpkin pie in Texas and now makes sweet potato pie in North Carolina.

Both are rich in ingredients from here, traditional methods from there, spices from there, she said. Mix in a little family history and that’s it. Both pies are a melting pot – literally.