As a reflection for Black History month, I wanted to share some insights I found as I researched the history of Sweet Potato Pie. It is interesting to learn that the Sweet Potatoes we are familiar with here in the U.S. originated in Peru and not West Africa as I thought the sweet potatoes were brought on slave ships during the slave trade. In addition, the sweet, orange-colored root vegetable is actually a sweet potato and not a yam. The word yam in African dialects was either “Oyame or Yam Yam” or a few other terms with a few other meanings. Yams are monocots from the Dioscoreaceae family and are long white fleshed root vegetables, that are only grown in the tropics of western Africa, Southeast Asia, India and the Caribbean Islands, with a growing season that is too short for the United States. Sweet Potatoes are Ipomoea batatas and come from the Morning Glory plant family.
As early as the 16th century, Spanish traders shipped sweet potatoes from the Americas across the Atlantic Ocean on two different routes, one headed to West Africa and the other to Western Europe.
But West African cooks didn’t like the sweet potato’s taste and focused primarily on eating the leaves. In addition, even if they liked sweet potatoes, West Africans would not naturally think of cooking them for “dessert.” That was something Europeans did.
Unlike West Africans, Western Europeans gave the sweet potato a sensational reception. It quickly earned a reputation as an aphrodisiac, got a shout-out in Shakespeare’s play “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (“Let the sky rain potatoes”) and started showing up on England’s royal tables. Henry VIII’s voracious appetite for sweet potato tarts, the pie’s close cousin, immediately gave sweet potatoes an elite status as a dessert.
Wealthy American colonial kitchens eagerly adopted the latest culinary trends out of England, and the Big Houses at plantations in the antebellum South were no exception. Look through the pages of the southern cookbooks used at that time – “The Virginia Housewife,” “The Kentucky Housewife” and “The Carolina Housewife” — and you will find strikingly similar recipes for pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie and squash pie existing side by side in the dessert sections. Southern cooks, black and white, turned more often to recipes for sweet potatoes because, in the South, they were easier to grow than pumpkins. Using the same thought process, Northern cooks preferred the easy-growing pumpkins for their pies. Using that sweet potato bounty, making the desserts in the Big House was often tasked to enslaved African American cooks, and it was through their expertise that sweet potato pie enters black culture.
Despite what was happening in the Big House, sweet potato pie took longer to catch on in the plantation’s slave cabins. In the antebellum South, dessert was not a regular part of a meal pattern, in addition, slave cabins rarely had the cooking equipment or appliances necessary to adequately bake a pie. The first dessert using sweet potatoes in the slave cabin was a whole sweet potato roasted in the embers of a dying fire. Because of the glassy look that the outside would get from the caramelization of the vegetable’s natural sugars, they were described as being “candied.” Only with the advent of improved and affordable stoves and increased access to processed ingredients such as white flour and sugar could African American cooks transition from roasting sweet potatoes to making cakes, cobblers and pies. Such composed desserts became a part of the special-occasion menu for weekends and holidays.
One of the earliest known recipe’s for Sweet Potato Pie comes from Abby Fisher who was born in South Carolina in 1832. After obtaining her freedom, her family moved to San Francisco where Abby became a successful cater and award-winning cook. The Fishers we able to open a family business, the ‘Mrs. Abby Fisher & Company’, a big achievement as a person and as a woman.
Despite being illiterate, Abby dictated her recipe book and had it published in 1881 under the name “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking: Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.,” by the Women’s Cooperative Printing Office, in San Francisco.
Below is an excerpt of the recipe from Abby Fisher’s cookbook and picture of her.
Sweet Potato Pie-What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, by Abby Fisher, 1881 (noted as the first African-American Cookbook)
As the slaves made the pie for large gatherings in celebration and as a part of family meals, the tradition has continued for family gatherings and black family reunions today. As I look back on my family with roots originating in Arkansas then migrating north to Ohio they took part in this tradition and I work to carry it on. During this Black History month, I give appreciation and thanks to the sweet potato pie, its origins and those that helped create it given the circumstances they were in.
Sources:
By Adrian Miller
November 24, 2015
Sweet Potato Pie-What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, by Abby Fisher, 1881 (noted as the first African-American Cookbook)
By: Irene de Souza
Little Known Black History Fact: Sweet Potato Pie
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