Great Grandma’s Sweet Potato Pie

A Recipe For Those People

Published in

THOSE PEOPLE

5 min readSep 24, 2015

Sweet potato pie is my all-time favorite dessert and my great-grandmother made it the best. She was raised in the South and there’re two things I can tell you about Southern cooks:

They never have enough butter and they never have any recipes, at least not written down.

I figured now was as good a time as any to learn how to make it, so I went as close as possible to the source — my grandmother.

We started with the crust.

But first, make sure to boil your 3–4 sweet potatoes while you’re making the crust to save time. Nana already had them going before I even got there in true grandmother fashion. You’ll want them boiling for about 30 minutes.

Back to the crust.

We used a recipe from probably the only cookbook my great-grandmother owned. It called for:

1 1/2 cups of sifted all-purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon of salt

1/2 cup shortening

4 to 5 tablespoons of cold water (we used 5)

We sifted the flour, added the salt, then just put all of the shortening in at once, stirred it, and added the water and stirred again. No time for sprinkling or gently tossing in this demonstration. Once you get it balled up, you’re going to want to flatten it out. First with your hands, and then with a rolling pin. Make sure to flour your surface to start off with and add as needed to keep it all together. You’re going to get it as flat as you can without breaking it and then roll it over your bowl. We used the dough itself, no rolling pin. Roll the flattened dough up like a scroll and then roll it back out over the bowl. Tear off any excess dough and use that for any patch-work you might need. I needed a lot. To finish off the crust, poke holes in the bottom with a fork.

You should end up with something like this:

Now preheat that oven to 450 degrees for later and you can start making the filling.

You’ll need about 2 cups of sweet potatoes. We had 4 potatoes and had plenty of extra filling, but, don’t worry, that just makes for sweet potato pudding to go with your pie. After they cool off, you want to peel them, mash them up, and then add the rest of the ingredients in the filling which are:

2 beaten eggs

1/2 cup of brown sugar (don’t forget to pack!)

1/4 cup of sugar

2 tablespoons(ish) of margarine

1 1/2 tablespoons(ish) of ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon(ish) of nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon(ish) of allspice

and adding 1 can of evaporated milk last.

If you have extra sweet potatoes like we did, you’ll want to add more sugar and spices.

Mix all that goodness up and pour that into your crust, leaving a little less than an inch of space between where the filling ends and the outer crust begins. Then sprinkle nutmeg on top.

Pop that sucker into your preheated oven for about 20 minutes.

After that, bring it down to 350 and cook for another 30 minutes. If you have extra filling, just toss that into another baking pan and cook it alongside your pie.

I had to run off to work while the pie finished baking so I missed the wonderful sensation of sitting in a room filling up with that warm cinnamon, sweet potato pie fragrance.

When I came home from work, this beauty was waiting for me:

Despite living right down the street from her, I don’t get a lot of bonding time with my grandmother and I think we both appreciated it. Nana was already asleep when I returned, so I brought the pie home and shared it with my mother. We both agreed: the crust was flakey, the pie was good, but it wasn’t as good as my great-grandmother’s. And that’s okay. It’s a start.

My mom and I ended up talking about her for at least an hour as we ate. My mom and great-grandmother were very close. She was the one who taught my mom how to cook that real Southern soul food when she was a kid. Black eyed peas. Ham hocks. Collard greens. The works. My mom tells me the same stories over and over again, and I listen and laugh like they’re brand new.