Behind the cultural divide between pumpkin and sweet potato pies

By Leah Asmelash, CNN

(CNN) — Debra Freeman isn’t a big pie person. But if she had to pick between sweet potato and pumpkin — the two autumnal pies that have come to define the Thanksgiving season — the choice is a simple one: Sweet potato.

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

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 forth. Sweet potato pie was always the dessert gracing their holiday table.

“Pumpkins were never thought about,” Freeman said. “I literally did not know about pumpkin pie until high school.”

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

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

But which one is actually the better pie? It’s a hotly contested debate — one that might come down to, mainly, where you were born.

Both pies are rooted in American history

It’s easy to simplify the debate as Black (sweet potato) versus White (pumpkin). But the actual history behind the two holiday staples is less neat.

Thanksgiving, as we know it today, is a relatively new holiday. Proposed by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War as a way to unite the country, it didn’t become a national holiday until 1941, just before Freeman’s mother was born. The delay was in part because of Southern pushback, who viewed the holiday as a way for the North to impart its ideals on the South, Freeman said.

Pumpkin pie, then, became a symbol for those 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 her book, Hale paints a mouthwatering 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 pinnacle 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’s still a popular choice for many Americans.

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

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

Neither pumpkin or sweet potatoes are indigenous to the United States specifically, nor are either necessarily native to White or Black cultures, said KC Hysmith, a food scholar. Sweet potatoes had already been brought back to Europe from Central and South America by Christopher Columbus and had made it to England by the 16th century — even mentioned as aphrodisiacs by Shakespeare. They were then brought up to New England in the 1700s.

Even our custom of pie-making was one 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 split that, if you trace it back far enough, isn’t a split,” Hysmith said. “It’s these two pies that are these wild amalgamations of globalization and colonization.”

The cultural divide between pies came later

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

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

That means that cooks in the South, often enslaved, were the ones actually doing the preparation. And sweet potatoes were reminiscent of the yams native to West Africa, where many slaves were 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 generations. Culinary historian Michael Twitty grows his own sweet potatoes for his pie, an unbroken family tradition dating 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 recipe for double-crusted sweet potato pie in his agricultural bulletin, Miller wrote, revitalizing 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, following 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 those healing factors for me,” McGee, who lives in Minnesota, told Twin Cities PBS earlier this year. “I just know that there’s power in it. I know that it means so much when people are able to have a slice of it, and it takes them into memories of happier places.”

Now, the divide between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie comes down to tradition, Freeman said. For some, pumpkin pie is the staple, and any other choice would be sacrilegious. For others, like Freeman, anything other than sweet potato pie would be unheard of. These Thanksgiving pies, much 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 hodgepodges of ingredients from here, traditional methods from there, spices from way over there, she said. Mix in a little family history, and there you go. Both pies are a melting pot — literally.

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