Sweet Potato Pie, Sweet Potato Pie (if I don't get some I think I'm gonna die)

[underused]

For those who recognise it, that title is a rip off of Dennis Lee's classic poem Alligator Pie. It's been in my head all day.

This week, we were gifted a huge box of local sweet potatoes so I went hunting for recipes. My first choice was a Sweet Potato Pie. It's a traditional dessert in the Southern US (and very much like the Pumpkin Pie so ubiquitous here in the fall).

After reading a lot of recipes I ended up combining two: this one from Danny Glover via Martha Stewart, and this Mississippi Sweet Potato Pie at the Spruce.

I also threw in some rosemary because I love rosemary and I had it on hand.

The result was delicious--but a lot sweeter than I expected. I think you could reduce the sugar to a cup or less if you're so inclined. (See below for an update.) Also, I discovered it's nearly impossible to take a picture of this dessert that doesn't end up looking like mid-century Kodachrome. That is some orange pie, my friend.

This makes enough filling for two 9" pie shells.

INGREDIENTS

Two 9" uncooked pie shells (I'll leave it to you how you acquire them ☺)

1 1/2 c cooked, mashed sweet potato
1 1/4 c sugar
1/2 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/2 c cream
1 1/2 tbsp fresh chopped rosemary (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Preheat oven to 350 F

Blend sweet potato and butter until creamy.
Add sugar and dry spices and blend thoroughly.
Add eggs and cream and blend again.
Stir in rosemary.

Spoon filling into the pie shells. It's quite thick, so you can fill to the top and smooth it a bit with the back of your spoon. (As you can see in the photo, it doesn't level out while baking.)

Bake for approximately 1 hour, until filling is set and a toothpick comes out clean.

UPDATE: I made this pie again using 1 c sugar with no difference in flavour. I also used a liberal quantity of sage instead of rosemary (about 2 tablespoons, fresh chopped) and it was divine.

Comments

[amidthestars]

Give away the green grass, give away the sky, but don't give away my alligator pie.

Okay, so this is quite unrelated to the actual pie, but I adored Alligator Pie as a child. Did you know it is an entire book (that is full of Toronto references)? And that the book was made into a movie (which I watched endlessly as a little person and, I just discovered, still have mostly memorized)? I think about this book all the time, even now.

(The actual pie sounds delicious, too.)

[amidthestars]

(Also, the movie is kind of unintentionally very creepy now that I'm watching it as not-a-6-year-old.)

[underused]

HA. Of course I knew it was a book! (I think we have a copy around here somewhere.) I loved it, but my mom was not a fan. She took umbrage at Silverstein's Prayer of the Selfish Child. She thought encouraging kids to be amused by bad behaviour was tacit encouragement. Also, she thought using a prayer for the purpose of satire was sacrilegious. For a mom who was mostly a lot of fun, there were certain kinds of humour she could not get behind. ☺

I had no idea they made a movie, though. How did I miss that?

[amidthestars]

I wonder if you're thinking of a different book? Alligator Pie was written by Dennis Lee (who is Canadian) - but he's easy to mistake with Shel Silverstein, who I also love. (This is the first I'm hearing of the Prayer of the Selfish Child, though - which made me laugh.) Dennis Lee was kind of a fixture in our house... my mom still buys Alligator Pie for every new baby in the family.

You can watch the whole movie on youtube. It's 45 minutes long and wayyy weirder than I remember.

[underused]

Geez louise, I totally am. I'm confusing it with Where the Sidewalk Ends. Sigh. I always get those two mixed up!

[full_metal_ox]

On the subject of Shel Silverstein: am I the only one who regards The Giving Tree as High Octane Nightmare Fuel--for at least two reasons?

(1) The asymmetry of the relationship--the tree is perfectly happy to give and give and give, its fruit and its leaves and then its body, until it's reduced to a literal stump--and the boy never thinks of the tree's well-being. (I want to imagine an epilogue in which the boy, who knows he won't be using his flesh and blood and bones much longer, offers them back to the tree; the final image is a tombstone at the foot of a stump sprouting newly budding shoots.)

(2) The likelihood that parents conscious of this point use the book to guilt their children.

(I dislike The Rainbow Fish for related reasons: I get the point about sharing one's gifts, but the metaphor sucks--the narrative applauds the titular protagonist's self-mutilation! Would it have been that hard to write a story about how the Rainbow Fish teaches the other fish to appreciate their own special traits?)

[underused]

Haha, I hear what you're saying, but I'm ok with it. I think how you read it has so much to do with where you are in your life. As a kid, I loved the tree for being so constant; as an adult, I envy the boy's ability to take that constancy for granted. But the relationship is what it is. People rarely love in equal amounts.

Also, The Giving Tree reminds me of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince. It's another one of my "holy crap that's sad" favourites. ☺

[wolfpurplemoon]

I never realised you could make pumpkin pie with sweet potatoes - those are much easier to prepare than pumpkins (though I've only ever used tinned pumpkin for pumpkin pie, which is very expensive due to being a US import).

It looks exactly like the pumpkin pies I've made in the past as well!

[underused]

Yeah, mostly I tried this out for exactly the reasons you state--sweet potatoes are cheaper and easier to prepare (and you can get them all year). After this, I'm fairly confident you could substitute mashed sweet potatoes into a pumpkin pie recipe without making any alterations.

And when my brother tasted it I had to convince him it was potatoes and not pumpkin.

[full_metal_ox]

I've also found them to be largely interchangeable in vegetable tempura; in local restaurants, the two are distinguishable chiefly by the shape--sweet potato is cut into oval medallions and squash into arcs.

(For whatever it might be worth, Marie Porter of Celebration Generation took it upon herself to create a literal Alligator Pie: http://www.celebrationgeneration.com/blog/2014/10/01/savoury-alligator-pie-recipe/comment-page-1/)

[underused]

I can't remember the last time I had tempura of any kind. I probably need to fix that.

The alligator pie looks tasty!