Author and National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson will be taking a break from writing this holiday season to bake some pies.
Not any pie, but sweet potato pies, which is a traditional dessert in African-American households during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.
“It's part of our history, you know? Who didn't have a grandmother or mother or an aunt in a kitchen making a sweet potato pie?” Woodson said. “And that's part of a deeper and longer story. So I think if we forget the foods of our past, both the negative and the positive connotations of them, then we're losing a big part of our history.”
Woodson won the National Book Award for young people's literature for her memoir "Brown Girl Dreaming." It tells the story of her childhood in South Carolina and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, in verse.
She stressed that sweet potato pie is not interchangeable with the similar-looking pumpkin pie.
“I think pumpkin pie just tastes more like a vegetable to me, and the spices are a little different and I think people tend to use more clove and ginger,” Woodson said. “With sweet potato pie we use evaporated milk and it’s not right without it and I think for pumpkin pie they don’t tend to use that kind of stuff… pumpkin pie, I don’t know, it’s just kind of wrong.”
Woodson recommends the recipe from the book “The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances From Alabama's Renowned Tuskegee Institute.” Click to page 170.