The SECRET to Sweet Potato Pie Every Black Grandmother Guards (Never Pumpkin)

In the fall of 1938, a woman named Odessa Mae baked nine sweet potato pies for a whole church on about forty cents of potatoes she dug out of her own dirt. Not one of them was pumpkin. Ten secrets that go into a real Black Southern sweet potato pie — why you never boil the potatoes, why the milk comes out of a little can, why the spice jar on your shelf is the wrong vegetable, and the one thing at number one that separates a grandmother's pie from every pie you've had that was almost right. None of it was ever written down. It was handed over, standing at somebody's elbow. So pull up a chair, baby. The oven's already warm. Keep the old ways.