“I used to make the best sweet potato pie you ever put your tooth on. Sweet potato pie is wonderful! You just peel your potatoes and cut them up raw. Cook them ’til tender. Add a teaspoonful of cinnamon. I don’t want but a dash of nutmeg-quarter of a teaspoonful-in mine. Put a tablespoon of butter and a cup of cream and a cup of sugar in your pan. The sweeter you make your sweet potato pie, the better it is!”

Addie Norton, Foxfire’s Book of Wood Stove Cooking

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Tipper

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14 Comments

  1. Now I remember the little tater pie ditty a bit differently,

    ♪ ♫ Tater Pie! Tater Pie!
    Choked to death on a cold tater pie.
    Yes I thought to the Lord I would die!
    Choked to death on a cold tater pie! ♫♫♪

    My mother sang that old song to me as a child. She is the same mother who held me to her breast and sang me to sleep with “Knoxville Girl.”

  2. My Aunt Jean (from Waynesville) gave me a recipe for sweet potato casserole that one of her aunts gave her. I have used it for years to make pie and always get rave reviews for it – especially from my northern in-laws. I top mine with pecans and a brown sugar crumble. Okay, now I gotta make one. BTW, my Michigan-bred horse absolutely adores slices of sweet potato. Who knew?!

  3. Tipper,
    Last year I got a Sweet Potato Pie instead of a Pumpkin pie, but I liked it just as well. I wasn’t paying much attention and someone had misplaced it at Ingles. I like Mrs. Smith’s pies anyway.

    My youngest daughter, Jennifer, is bringing me a Birthday Cake Thursday. When she asked what kind I wanted, I told her “I’m a Choc-a-haulic”. …Ken

  4. So delicious! I used to sing this song to my children:
    “Pie, pie, tater pie! I’m plum fool for tater pie!
    Eepers! Ipers! Eat a piece of pie,
    for I’m plum fool for tater pie.”

  5. As many readers will remember from my previous comments I have an aversion to food that has the color of pumpkin or most sweet potatoes. I me they have an offal taste. Maybe if I ate them blindfolded I would like them better but then I would likely have pie on my face. Nowthen there are white sweet taters available so maybe that has possibilities for a pie but I have yet to see a white fleshed punkin.

    PS: Offal is not a misspelling of awful! Look it up!

  6. Yep, sweet potato pie is a grand thing. I can see the brown sugar around the edges in the picture. Sweet potatoes must have brown sugar and butter!

  7. Sweet potato pie or any sweet potato makes me think of my dear sweet Mother. She loved ’em and I kept them on hand all the time for her. I read on them, and they are much healthier than a regular potato. They keep well, also. When they went on sale at Thanksgiving I bought up lots. I often fried them just like potatoes. I feared after she was gone that they would haunt me in the grocery store, but they seem to just remind me of sweet memories. However, I have not cooked them since, and alas Thanksgiving and Christmas go without that popular favorite. Hmm, maybe I just tired of them.

    It is interesting how different they are from growing seeds or Irish potatoes. This is way out there, but I would start fixing them up in about February with toothpicks and the pointy end resting in water in a glass. I would grow my own slips for planting. This worked very well, but not so well when my clumsy self would turn one of them over. It takes a long time for them to mature, but it was fun to experiment with. As always, Tipper has another interesting post on her blog.

  8. When I was growing up, we were poor but we always had sweet potatos and many times, for our dessert, mom would make a sweet potato cobbler. I still remember just how good they were.

  9. Your sweet potato pie sounds wonderful!
    I love them made with ‘candy-roaster’ and vanilla and what you said Tipper rather than spices. It’s a childhood thing, the way Mother made them for us when we were small. Then we asked for those special pies as long as she lived.
    A French chef couldn’t make anything better that Mother, could they??
    That’s something I’ve cautioned my three boys about saying since they were about age 20.
    (They have a list of things they won’t eat if I didn’t make it)

    1. My family never made sweet potato pie that I can remember. I prefer them to pumpkin. But we still ate a lot of them and we always grew them in the garden. We ate them baked in their skins and candied. For us candied was peeled and slice sweet potatoes, covered with white sugar, dotted with butter and then baked until the sugar turns to a very thick sugar syrup and is browning around the edges. So good!

  10. Now that this is the last week for the Bakery in Murphy (they are retiring) I guess I am going to have to start baking again. This sounds like a good place to start. A good sweet tater pie baking is the best smell in the world. Especially on a rainy day like today.

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