African-Americans Sweet potato & Yam History

The use of sweet potatoes in Southern and African-American cuisine traces back to West African influences. The sweet potato, which is native to the Americas, was likely used by African slaves as an alternative to the yam found in their homeland.

(slaves harvesting sweet potatoes )

The tradition was soon brought to America during slavery, where the African slaves transformed the dessert into something sweeter using yams, then sweet potatoes. Coincidentally, yams and black-eyed peas were common food slaves were fed during the Middle Passage.

As much as sweet potato pie is beloved within the black community and in the South, it doesn’t seem to get much love elsewhere. Our national pie divide is deepest when people choose between pumpkin pie and sweet potato pie. How did sweet potato pie become a soul-food favorite over its chief Thanksgiving rival? It started happening centuries ago, and it didn’t follow the path that you might expect.

When tracing the history of African American cuisine, it’s best to take stock of what was inherited from West Africa, our ancestral homeland. I’d thought and hoped that sweet potato pie had West African roots, but the trail begins in Peru, where sweet potatoes originated. 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.

West African cooks first experimented with sweet potatoes as a possible substitute for the other root crops (cassava, plantain, and yams) that they used to make a typical meal of some sort of starch served with a savory sauce, soup, or stew.  One particular specialty was fufu, in which a root is boiled, mashed, or pounded and shaped into balls.

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 that primarily consisted of boiled vegetables, cornbread, and buttermilk. 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.”  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.

"side note about the image above: Marion was also tasked with combating groups of freed slaves working or fighting alongside the British. He received an order from the Governor of South Carolina, to execute any blacks suspected of carrying provisions or gathering intelligence for the enemy "agreeable to the laws of this State"

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.