From The EBONY Cookbook: A Date with a Dish by Freda De Knight, Charles L. Blockson Collection of African-Americana and the African Diaspora
Contributor: Racine Amos, Eberly Family Special Collections Library
Recipe
1 ½ cups mashed sweet potatoes
2 tablespoons honey
⅓ cup sugar
½ cup crushed black walnuts (see Notes for a Modern Kitchen below)
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs
1 cup whipping cream
1 tablespoon grated orange peel
⅓ cup orange juice
⅔ cup milk
½ teaspoon nutmeg
Pinch salt
Flaky pastry pie crust
Beat eggs, potato and sugar together well. Add honey and milk. Add nuts, orange juice and vanilla. Add pinch of salt. Mix. Pour into flaky pie crust shell and bake in quick oven 10 minutes. Reduce heat. Continue to bake 30 minutes or until firm. Cool. Whip cream. Add grated orange peel and nutmeg. Spread on pie and serve. Nuts may be omitted and crushed pineapple added.
Notes for a Modern Kitchen
Like some of the early modern recipes, this recipe from the 1973 publication of The Ebony Cookbook: A Date with a Dish edited by Freda De Knight, doesn’t provide us with too many details about oven temperatures. We suggest that a quick oven means 375-400°F and when it tells you to reduce the oven, we suggest lowering it to 350°F. As for the following ingredients, here are some explanations and potential substitutions.
Black walnuts – substitute with pecans or crushed pineapple as the recipe suggests
Fresh sweet potatoes – substitute with canned sweet potatoes
1 cup whipped cream – whip heavy cream for this
Flaky pastry pie crust – feel free to use a pre-bought or your own family flaky pastry pie crust
Background
A Southern African-American tradition, the first recipe for sweet potato pie was published in one of the first cookbooks written by an African-American, “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking”, by Mrs. Abby Fisher, published in 1881. Abby was born sometime in the 1830’s in South Carolina, the daughter of a slave mother and a Frenchman fleeing Huguenot persecution in his home country. Mrs. Fisher moved in the 1850s, meeting her future husband and giving birth to three children in Alabama. In 1877, searching for a more promising future, Mrs. Fisher gave birth to her youngest child in Missouri. Two illiterate former slaves, ten children and a newborn traveled and survived the moving West using the Oregon Trail. In San Francisco, Mrs. Fisher became a caterer and her food reflected the types of food on a low country plantation. The 160 recipes in her book demonstrate the connection between West Africa and the New World that would meld together to form what we now call “Southern Food”. (Haff, 2011)
Slavery is at the core of the origin story of Sweet Potato Pie. While not native to Africa, the New World sweet potato is a sweeter tuber than the West African yam, which was familiar to slaves. Despite the elaborate baking rituals and concoctions being requested by their masters, enslaved African Americans created their own crustless sweet potato dessert involving molasses and spices. Without access to cooking equipment and flour for themselves, these enslaved cooks made sustenance out of what they had and cooked it in a hearth, eating sweet potatoes roasted by the fire or mashed and mixed with spices. (Jean-Baptiste, 2021)
After Emancipation, the ethnic and regional divides between pumpkin and sweet potato pies were laid bare in the national and regional media. Pumpkin pies were the pride of the North (especially New England), becoming closely associated with the Thanksgiving holiday by the late 1800s, and sweet potato pies were the South’s preferred pie, as well as an African American favorite. As millions of African Americans left the South for different parts of the country, they took their love of sweet potato pies with them, resulting in a national profile for a perpetually regional dessert.(Miller, 2015)
Works Cited
Haff, Harry. The Founders of American Cuisine: Seven Cookbook Authors, with Historical Recipes. McFarland, 2011.
Jean-Baptiste, Ondine. “You Sweet Potato, I Sweet Po-tah-to: The Origins of Sweet Potato Pie.” Greatist, 22 Nov. 2021.
Miller, Adrian. “How Sweet Potato Pie Became African Americans’ Thanksgiving Dessert.” The Washington Post, 15 Nov. 2015.