How to Make the Perfect Sweet Potato Pie!

by Pamelagrace Beatty

It’s the week before Thanksgiving and all through the house,

Somebody’s cooking, maybe helped by a spouse. 

The table is decorated with care,

In hopes that friends and relatives soon will be there. 

And in my family’s home there are wild, spicy dishes.

There are traditional ones too, that are really delicious!

And the sweet potato pie is the most auspicious!

OK, enough of the rhyming, let’s get down to business.  For many people, pumpkin pie is a traditional Thanksgiving dessert.  I noticed in the local grocery store here on Whidbey Island (across from Seattle, WA) that there has been a front row display of canned Carnation milk and pureed pumpkin for weeks! I imagine pumpkin pies are very popular here.  I don’t believe I have ever eaten a pumpkin pie at my family Thanksgiving dinners. We are purists when it comes to that custard, and sweet potato pie reigns

Why sweet potato pie?  It’s a southern thing.  Actually, it is an historic thing.  When Black people were brought to the U.S. as slaves, some recognized the sweet potato (or yam) as a vegetable they had in Africa.  It became the dessert of choice versus pumpkin.  Most of the folks in my family are Black.  My parents and other Black folks moved from the south to the Northwest in the 40s and brought many of their favorite foods here. For example, Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without mac and cheese, greens (collards, mustards, or turnip), cornbread (to go with the greens) and sweet potato pie.  Of course, we have the traditional turkey and dressing with gravy and frequently, we have exotic new dishes like cheese grits, etouffee, oyster dressing, fried corn, Cajun dressing and honey-smoked ham (now a tradition).  Sometimes the turkey is deep fried (OMG, so good!) or smoked. 

My sister’s brother-in-law has perfected deep frying turkey.  I remember the early attempts to do so and for a while, I was nervous every time my brother-in-law’s twin brother announced, “We’re gonna deep fry a turkey!”  It got a little hairy at times as he learned which oil was best (peanut), how hot it should be (no clue), and how long to cook the turkey (not as long as they thought). Now, my brother-in-law’s twin brother has it down to perfection.  He is so good at it that he gets requests to cook a turkey breast for some of us personally, so we have leftover turkey after Thanksgiving. You would think we have turkey from our family dinner, but it is hard to get those leftovers after our family dinner because pre-pandemic we had around 40 to 50 people! My mother started having Thanksgiving dinner just for her immediate family (my dad, me, my sister and her six kids, their spouses/friends of kids).  But…same issue, no leftovers after the crowd dined. So, while my mom was alive, I cooked a small turkey just for the three of us. When she passed, I cooked one just for me and my dad, only to discover he hated turkey.  Who knew? Fortunately, he likes sweet potato pie.

First…

 How to cook the perfect sweet potato pie? It starts with the potatoes.  Here’s the deal: sweet potato pie doesn’t use sweet potatoes.  It uses yams!  That’s what makes that rich yellow orange color.  The color of the pie when using actual yellow sweet potatoes is a sickly yellow, not the rich red orange of yams.  Yams have more flavor too. 

I learned how to make the pie by eating other people’s pies and comparing them with my grandmothers’.  Both my father’s mother and my mother’s mother made excellent sweet potato pies. I mean these pies were good!  They would win prizes if we did that kind of thing in their day.  It was hard to decide which of my grandmothers made the best tasting pie. Both were so good but there was a definite difference between the two.  Naturally they would not give me their secret recipe, so I watched them repeatedly to figure out what they did. What were the ingredients and how much of them did they use?  Neither pulled out a cookbook and studied a recipe.  Both cooked using the recipes in their heads.  I take after them, although I confess, I started with cookbooks because I had nothing in my head. I didn’t cook when growing up. The most I did was scrambled eggs for breakfast, French fries for lunch and tossed salad for dinner while my mom cooked the rest of the meal.  I didn’t study what she did because I had no interest in cooking, so why watch?  Consequently, when I grew up and lived on my own, I knew nothing about cooking. 

While visiting home one day, I claimed the lovely Betty Crocker cookbook my Grandma Susie gave to me when I graduated college.  She knew I would need it.  My mom reluctantly parted with it.  She too had not known how to cook when she went out to live on her own.  After getting married, she finally found cookbooks to be very helpful. My dad was grateful when she did.  For years he talked about how mom only knew how to cook spaghetti when they were first married.  By the time we came along, he was thoroughly tired of spaghetti although we still had it once a week. I love it to this very day.

So, I didn’t know how to cook but the Betty Crocker cookbook was quite helpful for general recipes for daily meals.  There were no recipes for southern cooking and certainly not sweet potato pie.  That is why I began to study what grandmothers did when they cooked.

Second…

Of course, part of a good pie is the crust.  Both grandmothers made excellent pie crust.  Although I watched them like a hawk, I never achieved their flawless, flakey crusts. After many failed efforts, I now cheat and buy good readymade crust.  That problem solved. 

Third…

Now we come to the exciting part: the sweet potato pie custard.  Yep, it’s a custard because it has eggs and milk in it.  Well, one grandmother used milk, but not just any milk,only Pet Milk.  It isn’t easy to find that canned milk. In fact, I couldn’t find it this year. It adds a very unique taste to the pie, and it was the Pet Milk that made Grannie’s pie so good!  The other grandmother’s secret ingredient was bourbon.  Not scotch, not rum, not brandy, but bourbon. She didn’t use milk in her pies. She did include eggs, sugar, spices and…bourbon.  I tried combining the two recipes.  Bad idea.  They are two separate approaches. Both good. Both best when separate.  At this point, I have finally discovered I like the Grannie’s recipe with the Pet Milk best. That may be because I never have bourbon in the pantry, and don’t go out and buy any just for making sweet potato pies.

And, Finally…

Now you can bypass Betty Crocker and me and look up how to make sweet potato pies online.  However, the recipes I saw didn’t tell you to get yams.  Since yams are actually a variety of sweet potatoes, that may be why they don’t tell you the difference, but there is a flavor difference as I mentioned before. And I have my own secret ingredients, which I will share with you here.  Instead of white sugar, I use brown.  It is more difficult to get the pie sweet enough (can’t get it too sweet; it’s ok if it is very sweet) so you have to use a lot of it.  How much? I don’t know.  I just “feel into it,” depending on how many pies I am making. Also, use lots of spices, cinnamon, allspice, a dash of cloves (got to go light with that one or it can overpower the other spices), and another secret ingredient is a dash of cardamom and one of ginger spice too.  How much? Just “feel into it” (smile). 

If you haven’t tried making a sweet potato pie but have made and do like pumpkin, you will probably like sweet potato too. They use many of same ingredients. A good pumpkin pie is almost as good as a sweet potato pie – almost.  Bon appetit!