CNN
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Debra Freeman isn’t much of a cake person. But if she had to choose between sweet potato and pumpkin — the two fall pies that define the Thanksgiving season — the choice would be simple: sweet potato.

“Being from the South,” Freeman, a food historian, told CNN, “I believe I have a legal obligation to do this.”

For them it’s not so much a question of taste. She thinks back to her grandmother, who learned the recipe from her grandmother before her, and so on. Sweet potato pie was always the dessert on her holiday table.

“Pumpkins were never thought about,” Freeman said. “I literally knew nothing about pumpkin pie until high school.”

These days it’s almost impossible to escape the pumpkin mania that comes with the first yellowing leaf. From our coffee to our candles, this spicy aroma has infiltrated our culture. But in many households, particularly African-American households, sweet potato pie is still the de rigueur.

Although they have their nuances, the two types of cakes are not that different: both have a sweet custard filling, are warmly spiced and are held in place by the puff pastry. Sweet potatoes could be a little sweeter; Pumpkin a little spicier.

But which is actually the better cake? It’s a hotly contested debate – one that might be all about where you were born.

It’s easy to simplify the debate as black (sweet potato) versus white (pumpkin). But the actual story behind the two holiday staples is less clear.

Thanksgiving as we know it today is a relatively new holiday. Proposed by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War to unite the country, it did not become a national holiday until 1941, shortly before Freeman’s mother was born. The delay was due in part to opposition from the South, which saw the holiday as a way for the North to convey its ideals to the South, Freeman said.

Pumpkin pie then became a symbol of these Nordic ideals. Sarah Josepha Hale, an activist and abolitionist, urged Lincoln to begin the Thanksgiving tradition and wrote about the holiday in her 1827 book, “Northwood: A Tale of New England.”

In her book, Hale paints a delicious scene: a roast turkey at the head of the table, savory stuffing, “a sirloin of beef” and two pies, chicken and pumpkin, both “indispensable components of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.” ”

Thanks to this book, pumpkin pie was considered the highlight of a Thanksgiving feast even before the holiday became nationally celebrated, Freeman said. It thus became an abolitionist symbol of Northern ideals. To this day, it remains a popular choice for many Americans.

Sarah O’Brien is the founder of local Atlanta bakery chain Little Tart Bakeshop. Even though O’Brien has lived in the South for more than a decade, the bakery offers pumpkin pie instead of sweet potatoes ahead of the holidays. It’s now the store’s best-selling Thanksgiving cake.

“When I started baking pies at Little Tart 13 years ago, I made what I ate as a child for the Ohio holidays,” O’Brien told CNN. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the pumpkin vs. sweet potato question when it came to the bakery; I just started baking a pumpkin pie that I’m proud of and people enjoyed it.”

Neither pumpkin nor sweet potatoes are specifically native to the United States, nor are they necessarily native to white or black cultures, said KC Hysmith, a nutritionist. Sweet potatoes were brought back to Europe from Central and South America by Christopher Columbus and came to England in the 16th century – even mentioned by Shakespeare as aphrodisiacs. They were then brought to New England in the 18th century.

Even our custom of baking cakes is typical of 17th and 18th century England, Hysmith said. And of course the spices and sugar were products of the spice trade.

“So we have this divide that, if you trace it back far enough, is not a divide,” Hysmith said. “It’s these two cakes that represent this wild fusion of globalization and colonization.”

In the South, sweet potatoes became an important crop – North Carolina is still the leading sweet potato producer, followed by California and Mississippi.

Because sweet potatoes were more common than pumpkins in the South, they were used as filling for pies, a custom of the English upper classes that was emulated by colonists in the United States, historian Adrian Miller wrote in “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine.”

This means that the cooks in the South, who were often enslaved, were actually responsible for the preparation. And sweet potatoes were reminiscent of the yams native to West Africa, where many slaves came from. This abundance of sweet potatoes, both in pastry form and other forms, led to sweet potato pie’s entry into the soul food canon.

The importance of sweet potato pie to African Americans has continued through generations. Culinary historian Michael Twitty grows his own sweet potatoes for his pie, an ongoing family tradition that dates back to at least the 18th century, he told CNN. They never ate pumpkin pie, he said.

In the 1930s, George Washington Carver, famous for his peanut butter, popularized a recipe for double-crust sweet potato pie in his Agricultural Bulletin, reviving the recipe’s popularity. A few decades later, Georgia Gilmore sold sweet potato pie and other foods to finance the Montgomery bus boycott.

More recently, after the murder of Michael Brown, baker Rose McGee brought 30 sweet potato pies to Ferguson, Missouri, to feed the affected community.

“The sweet potato pie was one of those healing factors for me,” McGee, who lives in Minnesota, told Twin Cities PBS earlier this year. “I just know there is power in it. I know it means so much when people can have a piece of this and it brings back memories of happier places.”

Now, the distinction between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie comes down to tradition, Freeman said. For some, pumpkin pie is the staple diet, and any other choice would be sacrilege. For others, like Freeman, anything other than sweet potato pie would be unthinkable. These Thanksgiving cakes, much like the holiday itself, are more about nostalgia than anything else.

Either way, both pies are the most American things you can eat, said Hysmith, who, for what it’s worth, grew up in a white family, ate pumpkin pie in Texas, and now bakes sweet potato pie in North Carolina.

Both are a mix of ingredients from here, traditional methods from there and spices from over there, she said. Add a little family history and there you go. Both cakes are a melting pot – literally.