The long-standing debate between sweet potato and pumpkin pie is about as old as Thanksgiving itself. But their history is not that different.
Debra Freeman isn’t a big pie person. But if she had to pick between sweet potato and pumpkin — the two autumnal pies that have come to define the Thanksgiving season — the choice is a simple one: Sweet potato. “Being from the South,” Freeman, a food historian, told CNN, “I think I’m legally obligated.” For her, it’s not so much a matter of taste. She thinks back to her grandmother, who learned the recipe from her grandmother before her, and so forth.
” Neither pumpkin or sweet potatoes are indigenous to the United States specifically, nor are either necessarily native to White or Black cultures, said KC Hysmith, a food scholar. Sweet potatoes had already been brought back to Europe from Central and South America by Christopher Columbus and had made it to England by the 16th century — even mentioned as aphrodisiacs by Shakespeare. They were then brought up to New England in the 1700s.
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