A Cook With A Reliable Crust
Courtesy of the Florida Memory Project
The Chicago Defender printed this pie recipe in August 1939, at the close of a decade in which the Depression had emptied wallets across Chicago’s South Side. The paper sold the dish on thrift and comfort: a pie that fills you up, ends a light warm-weather supper, and costs almost nothing to assemble. Editors credited the recipe to Mrs. Emma McReynolds rather than to an anonymous test kitchen, a small but deliberate act. Papers like the Defender treated home cooks as authorities worth naming, and in doing so they built an archive of working women’s expertise that no university had bothered to collect. The sweet potato at the center of the recipe had traveled north with migrants from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, who grew it in backyard plots, bought it cheap by the bushel, and turned it into pies that sold at church suppers, rent parties, and lunch counters. Those pies generated real money. A cook with a reliable crust and a steady supply of sweet potatoes controlled a revenue stream she owned outright, and that kind of independence is where economic freedom begins.
Emma McReynolds’s Sweet Potato Pie
Ingredients
2 cups cooked sweet potatoes
¾ cup brown sugar
¾ cup white sugar
1 ½ cups milk
¼ stick butter
2 eggs
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
Directions
Mix the sugars, salt, and spices. Add the sweet potatoes, beaten eggs, and melted butter. Add the milk gradually and mix well. Pour into a pie pan lined with pastry and bake in a hot oven (450°F) for ten minutes. Reduce the heat to 325°F and bake 30 minutes longer.
The Chicago Defender, national edition, August 19, 1939, p. 18.