ASweet Potato Pie recipe was submitted by Mrs. Ed Stein to the sixth edition of Fredericksburg’s PTA Cookbook in 1948. Seven years earlier, in 1941, Jewell Grosse Kothmann submitted her Sweet Potato Custard Pie recipe to Mason’s PTA Cookbook. Jewel’s grandfather had built Mason’s Reynolds-Seaquist House in 1891.
In 1940, she married Dr. Victor Kothmann, a Texas A&M University graduate who was immediately sent to the Pacific as a Veterinary Officer with the 112th Cavalry during World War II. His unit was among the first American forces to land in Japan during the occupation before being deactivated in January 1946.
Returning home, Victor opened a veterinary clinic in Mason. Their son, Teddy, was born in 1947. Tragically, Jewell died when Teddy was only 13 years old, leaving Victor to raise him alone. In the summer of 1963, he reluctantly allowed Teddy and three other Mason boys to travel to Montana to work on a dude ranch. Near Big Timber, Montana, a headon collision claimed the lives of Teddy and another cousin. Dr. Kothmann had now lost his entire family. He remained a widower for the next 40 years.
Texas was still producing about 5.1 million bushels of sweet potatoes annually during the 1950s. They thrived in the sandy soils near Mason County rivers, though yields had already begun declining in the 1940s. With few commercial growers remaining, most local families raised enough only for home use. Americans were then eating nearly 23 pounds of sweet potatoes per person each year. Perhaps that is why Jewell, as a young bride in 1941, chose this recipe for Mason’s PTA cookbook.
By 2000, per-person consumption had fallen to a shocking low of only 1.8 pounds annually. Today, however, sweet potatoes have surged back in popularity as consumers seek healthier foods. Global sweet potato sales are projected to reach $55.6 billion by 2030.
Sweet potatoes originated in South America and have been domesticated for at least 5,000 years. They are nutritious, starchy tubers, and close relatives of morning glories. In 1947, the famous Kon-Tiki expedition sailed west across the Pacific on a primitive balsa raft to prove that South Americans might have reached Polynesia before Columbus arrived in the New World.
At Fredericksburg High School in 1958, in Ella Gold’s world history class, we learned that such voyages were possible. Historians then believed South Americans had carried sweet potatoes westward to Polynesia. Modern DNA evidence, however, now suggests that Polynesians likely reached South America nearly 300 years before Columbus, discovered sweet potatoes there, and carried them back across the Pacific. From Polynesia, sweet potatoes spread to Easter Island, Hawaii, New Zealand, Asia, India, and Africa.
When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, Columbus carried sweet potatoes back to Europe. They quickly became fashionable foods there. Within 60 years they had spread widely across Europe. The English later introduced them into their North American colonies, where they grew especially well in the South. English cooks, already familiar with pumpkin puddings and pies, soon adapted sweet potatoes into similar dishes.
The sweet potato role in colonial America was first documented in the 1740s, though Virginia colonists had likely been growing and eating them since the mid-1600s. Thomas Jefferson reportedly loved them. By the late 1800s, Fannie Farmer featured recipes for glazed sweet potatoes in her famous Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Sweet potato dishes became especially popular throughout the South.
In 1881, Abby Fisher published what may have been the first printed recipe for sweet potato pie. Fisher, born into slavery, became one of America’s earliest African American cookbook authors. Her recipe was simple and wholesome, closely resembling the sweet, custardlike pies still enjoyed today.
Sweet potato pie eventually became deeply woven into African American food traditions. At places like American Beach, a historic African American resort community in northeast Florida, sweet potato pie became a beloved comfort food during the segregation era. The pie is a reminder not only of survival and resilience, but also of the remarkable creativity enslaved cooks brought to Southern foodways.
Many enslaved Africans had been familiar with yams in Africa, a tuber somewhat similar to sweet potatoes. True yams, however, were largely absent in the Americas. Southern cooks adapted sweet potatoes into dishes that resembled traditional yam recipes from Africa. By the 1800s, sweet potato pies had become common in both Black and white Southern households.
By the early 1900s, the pie had firmly established itself as a Southern tradition. It became a “taste of home” served during holidays, church suppers, family reunions, and celebrations. During the 1950s, sweet potato pie was a common dessert throughout the South, especially during Thanksgiving and Christmas, often replacing pumpkin pie, which remained more popular in Northern states. It was more than dessert. It represented comfort, celebration, and continuity.
Then came the Great Migration, when millions of African Americans moved north and west seeking better opportunities and fleeing Jim Crow violence. They carried their recipes and traditions with them, helping sweet potato pie become a national comfort food. Families passed recipes from one generation to the next, each adding its own touches.
Today, sweet potato pie remains beloved in both African American and Southern households. While many Americans associate it with Thanksgiving and Christmas, in much of the South it remains a yearround favorite. Whether served at church socials, backyard barbecues, or after Sunday dinner, sweet potato pie still has a remarkable way of bringing people together.
