Sweet Potato Pie

A fluted pastry crust surrounds a sweet layer of sweet potato. Sweet potato pie from the American South is a baked dessert with a filling of mashed sweet potato combined with eggs, dairy, sugar and other ingredients. The top is not covered with crust, so the smooth, spiced surface stays visible. When orange-fleshed sweet potatoes are used, the cut surface is orange too, and each slice includes both the dense filling and the thin crust.

Crust-lined desserts once called “pudding”

Printed recipes (ingredient formulations and methods) that use sweet potato in sweet baked goods go back to the 18th century. Amelia Simmons’s “American Cookery” (1796) states that a winter squash pudding may be made with sweet potatoes instead. At this point, the dish was called a pudding, not a pie.

In the early 19th century, recipes that fill a pastry crust with sweet potato appear. The “Sweet Potato Pudding” in the 1827 edition of Mary Randolph’s “The Virginia Housewife” calls for sweet potatoes boiled until soft and pressed through a sieve while still hot, combined with eggs, sugar, butter, nutmeg, lemon peel and brandy, and baked in a dish lined with pastry. Sugar is sprinkled over the top, and it is garnished with citron. Although it is called a pudding, the filling is put in a shell made of pastry and baked.

Some of today’s sweet potato casseroles are also sweet sweet potato dishes baked in an ovenproof dish with a sweet topping. A pie, however, has a shell made of flour and fat. The change in name from “pudding” to “pie” and the change in form, meaning whether pastry is used, did not necessarily happen at the same time.

African American food culture in the American South and a pie for celebrations

The sweet potato is native to the Americas and is a different plant from the yam that was familiar in West Africa. Enslaved people made use of the sweet potatoes available to them in their cooking. Sweet potatoes became an important ingredient in the African American food culture of the American South. One of the dishes from that cooking led to the sweet pie.

It is a pie for celebrations, also cut and shared at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even at Thanksgiving, when pumpkin pie is the well-known choice, some African American households put sweet potato pie at the center of the table. The cinnamon and nutmeg aromas and the orange filling in a pastry shell may be similar, but the choice between pumpkin and sweet potato also reflects family and regional food customs.

Family pies carried to new homes, and memories of Kwanzaa

People who migrated from the South to other parts of the country in the 20th century also took the flavors of their holiday tables with them. In Thom Reed’s family, his grandmother Theora had learned the recipe from her mother in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and brought the pie to Chicago and then, in the 1940s, to Gary, Indiana. He recalls that it was always baked for Thanksgiving and Christmas. In the family of Lirit Gilmore, who works on foodways at the Smithsonian, the pie was eaten with greens and beans on January 1, the last day of Kwanzaa. The pie her father baked was a holiday treat, and she says that on the following day she would sometimes take a cold slice from the refrigerator and eat it with her hands. Gilmore’s family memories preserve two ways of eating it: as a pie cut for a celebration and as an everyday snack the next day.

Baked for celebrations and mourning, and given to people facing hardship

Some bakers give pies handed down in their families to people in their communities. Rose McGee grew up in Jackson, Tennessee, where her grandmother and great-grandmother often baked sweet potato pies and delivered them to people who had lost family members, to people who had just given birth and to newlyweds. After she married, McGee asked her grandmother for the recipe and, after many failures, learned to bake it herself.

In 2014, after Michael Brown, a young Black man, was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, McGee loaded about 30 pies into a car and traveled with her son from Minnesota to Ferguson. Handing pies to the people she met there led to Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, an initiative that helps people from different backgrounds talk with one another. It is one baker’s practice of sharing a dessert that families cut at celebrations with people who are grieving as well.

Texture shaped by the proportions of sweet potato, eggs and dairy, and by the bake

The sweet potatoes are baked or boiled until soft, then peeled and mashed. Breaking up fibers and large lumps lets the potato mix evenly with the eggs and dairy and gives a clean cut surface. Unlike juicy fruit pies, a sweet potato filling has a dense mouthfeel.

The sweet potato is mixed with eggs, sugar, melted butter, cream and similar ingredients, and layers of aroma are added with cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, vanilla and other flavorings. Depending on the proportion of sweet potato to dairy and eggs, the filling can be dense or close to a smooth custard. The character of the filling depends not only on how the sweet potato is prepared but also on the amounts of liquid and eggs.

For the shell, cold butter is scattered through flour, the dough is brought together with cold water or a similar liquid, chilled, rolled into a circle and fitted into a pan. In the method of pastry author Erin Jeanne McDowell, the crust is first blind-baked with pie weights, then the weights are removed and the bottom is baked through before the filling goes in. The pie comes out of the oven when the edges of the filling are set and the center still wobbles slightly, and it is then cooled so it can set. Some recipes skip blind baking and instead balance the proportion of sweet potato to liquid with the way the bottom is baked to ensure the pie cooks through.

Served with whipped cream, the dense texture of the sweet potato can be enjoyed together with the lightness of the airy cream. Some recipes toast a white, marshmallow-like topping. In a pie with no topping, the smooth filling and the fluted edge of the crust serve as the decoration on their own.

In Hawaii, haupia is layered over baked sweet potato

In Hawaii, there is a pie that layers white haupia over sweet potato. In a recipe published by Hawaiian Electric in 2018, Okinawan or Molokai sweet potatoes are combined with eggs, unsweetened evaporated milk and other ingredients, poured into a pastry shell and baked.

Once the pie has cooled, haupia, made by cooking coconut milk, water, sugar and cornstarch until thickened, is poured over it, and the pie is chilled further. The lower layer is baked with eggs and sweet potato, and the upper layer is set with starch, so the two layers are made in separate steps. It uses the same kind of potato as the single-layer Southern pie, but the white layer that divides its cross-section has a different texture and aroma.

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