CNN
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Debra Freeman is not a big cake person. But if she had to choose between sweet potato and pumpkin — the two fall pies that have come to define the Thanksgiving season — the choice is simple: sweet potato.

“Being from the South,” Freeman, a food historian, told CNN, “I think I have a legal obligation.”

For her it is not so much a matter 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 that graced their holiday table.

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

These days, it’s nearly impossible to escape the pumpkin mania that accompanies the first yellowing leaf. From our coffee to our candles, that spicy aroma has permeated our culture. But in many homes, especially African American ones, sweet potato pie remains supreme.

While they have their nuances, the two types of pies aren’t that different: Both have a sweet custard filling, warmly spiced and held in by that puff pastry. Sweet potato may be slightly sweeter; pumpkin a little spicier.

But which one is actually the better cake? It’s a hotly contested debate – one that may mainly have to do with where you were born.

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

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

Pumpkin pie therefore became a symbol for those northern ideals. Sarah Josepha Hale, an activist and abolitionist, urged Lincoln to start the Thanksgiving tradition, writing about the holiday in her 1827 book, “Northwood: A Tale of New England.”

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

Thanks to this book, pumpkin pie came to be seen as a highlight of a Thanksgiving celebration, even before the holiday was celebrated nationally, Freeman said. It thus became an abolitionist symbol of Northern ideals. To this day, it is still a popular choice for many Americans.

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

“When I started making pies at Little Tart 13 years ago, I was making what I ate as a kid for the holidays in Ohio,” O’Brien told CNN. “I don’t think I ever saw it as a question about pumpkin versus sweet potato at the bakery; I just started making a pumpkin pie that I’m proud of, and people loved it.”

Neither squash nor sweet potatoes are specifically native to the United States, nor are they necessarily native to white or black cultures, says food scientist KC Hysmith. Sweet potatoes had already been brought to Europe from Central and South America by Christopher Columbus and had ended up in England in the 16th century – even mentioned by Shakespeare as an aphrodisiac. They were then brought to New England in the 18th century.

Even our custom of making pies was 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 a split that, if you trace it back far enough, it’s not a split,” Hysmith said. “It’s these two pies that are these wild fusions of globalization and colonization.”

In the South, sweet potatoes became an important crop; North Carolina is still the largest producer of sweet potatoes, followed by California and Mississippi.

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

That means that cooks in the South, often enslaved, were the ones who actually did 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 baked goods and other forms, led to sweet potato pie entering the soul food canon.

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

In the 1930s, George Washington Carver, famous for his peanut butter, distributed a recipe for double-crust sweet potato pie in his agricultural bulletin, Miller wrote, reviving its popularity. A few decades later, Georgia Gilmore sold sweet potato pies and other foods to help fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

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

“The sweet potato pie has been 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 get a piece of it, and that it takes them back to memories of happier places.”

Now the divide between sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie comes down to tradition, Freeman said. For some, pumpkin pie is the staple, and any other choice would be sacrilege. For others, like Freeman, anything other than sweet potato pie would be unheard of. These Thanksgiving pies, 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 that ate pumpkin pie in Texas, and now makes sweet potato pie in North Carolina.

Both are a mix of ingredients from here, traditional methods from there, herbs from far away, she said. Throw in a little family history, and there you go. Both cakes are literally a melting pot.