For many Americans, the Thanksgiving feast just isn’t complete until they dig into a slice of pumpkin or sweet potato pie — and for some, there’s simply no room for both.
The two desserts have similarities — both are orange, sweet and have a bit of spice — but they have distinct histories that have led to dedicated followings.
At Ol’ Henry Restaurant in suburban St. Louis, opinions are strong.
“Sweet potato pie. Definitely,” said owner Ada Joyce Taylor.
Her granddaughter, operational manager Audrianna Black, agrees. “I’m looking for that sweetness in a pie,” she added.
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Taylor started the soul food business almost 10 years ago, naming it after her late husband, Henry Edward Taylor. Today, the walls are lined with signed photos and memorabilia, and it’s a well-known destination for those craving sweet potato pie.
“On a normal week, I would say that we go through 15 to 20 sweet potato pies,” said chef Tracy Stevenson. “During the holiday, I would say 40 or 50.”
Both sweet potato and pumpkin pies are American staples with a starchy custardlike filling. Pumpkin pie tends to be more heavy on spice, while sweet potato pie is typically sweeter and lighter.
But the reasons why people choose one over the other often trace back to where they were raised and their race.
“Always sweet potato pie”
The origins of these two desserts stretch back to the 15th and 16th centuries, when European settlers brought sweet potatoes and pumpkins back to Europe from the Americas.
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With sweet potato pie, settlers may have been trying to replicate the European dish carrot pie, a dessert with layered slices of carrots, according to soul food historian and James Beard Award-winning author Adrian Miller.
“You’ll see recipes in the historical record that have sweet potato pie in layered slices,” Miller said. “They know that they’re sweet and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve got this natural sweet vegetable that’s orange, I could use this as a substitute for carrot pie.’”
Miller said carrot pie recipes of the time had similar methods and spicing as those used for sweet potato pie.
As colonization expanded across the Americas, enslaved Africans learned how to cook sweet potatoes. Miller said the potatoes may have resonated among enslaved people because they’re somewhat similar to yams, a root vegetable grown in West Africa.
However, he said, the idea of putting sweet potato into pie form came from European culture.
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“It’s really the expertise of these enslaved cooks, making something unfamiliar to them to please their slaveholders, that eventually gets embraced and adopted,” Miller said. “It’s the same with things like fried chicken, barbecue and all these other things that were not necessarily part of the West African food heritage.”
Since then, sweet potato pie has become a hallmark of Black cuisine and common on dinner tables across the South.
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For Miller, sweet potato pie means family and culture.
“We’ve never had a pumpkin pie grace our table, unless somebody who doesn’t know us brought one over, if we invited someone,” Miller said with a smile. “And that’s on us, right? Because we should have given them a warning not to bring that stuff over. So it’s always sweet potato pie.”
“The perfect Thanksgiving dessert”
But it’s pumpkin pie that plays a central role in the portrait of a quintessential Thanksgiving dinner.
Like sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie’s roots go back to a time when European settlers were experimenting with foods grown locally. They learned how to boil or steam pumpkins that were first domesticated by Native Americans. Early pumpkin pie recipes can be found in both early Colonial and French cookbooks.
“The pumpkin pie itself has this whole world history within it, not only the Columbian Exchange, but the spice exchange,” said culinary historian and Roosevelt University Professor Emeritus Bruce Kraig.
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But an 1827 novel is largely responsible for the dessert’s connection to the holiday. In Northwood: A Tale of New England, author and activist Sarah Josepha Hale dedicated a chapter to describing what is the now-classic Thanksgiving dinner.
“She virtually invented it — the turkeys, the cranberry sauce,” Kraig said. “She said pumpkin pie is the American pie.”
In 1863, Hale convinced President Abraham Lincoln to declare a national day of Thanksgiving.
Pumpkin pie remains closely linked to the holiday.
At The Blue Owl Bakery in House Springs, Mo., owner Kim Byerly said demand is through the roof for the restaurant’s pumpkin pies. They expect to sell several hundred and are expanding by shipping the pies across the country this year.
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Byerly is a fan of pumpkin pie, even if it took her years to actually try it.
“I just like the flavor and the consistency of it,” Byerly said. “You mix it with that whipped cream and it’s just like the perfect Thanksgiving dessert.”
The Blue Owl’s bakers also make several variations of the traditional pumpkin pie, including pumpkin gooey butter cheesecake, but so far, no sweet potato pie.
Cindi Wittu, a baker at The Blue Owl, said that while she’s had both pies, she prefers pumpkin.
“I’m partial to the spices that are in it,” she said. “It just reminds me of home, of family.”
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Chad Davis is a reporter for St. Louis Public Radio. This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest.
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Benny Gantz has threatened to leave Israel’s emergency government if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not commit to a new plan for the war with Hamas in Gaza and its aftermath.
In a televised statement on Saturday evening, Gantz, an opposition figure and former general who joined Netanyahu’s coalition in the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, said that his centrist National Unity party would leave the government if his demands were not met by June 8.
Gantz’s ultimatum brings to a head months of tensions within Netanyahu’s government over the handling of the war, and comes just days after defence minister Yoav Gallant slammed Netanyahu for the lack of a postwar plan for Gaza, the enclave Hamas has ruled since 2007.
A six-month-old baby is currently hospitalized after a man allegedly shot the infant several times during an armed home standoff in Surprise, Arizona, about 30 miles north-west of Phoenix.
At about 3am on Friday, the father of the child allegedly broke into the home where the child and mother lived, according to Surprise police. The child’s father did not live in the house, police said, adding that the man held the mother and child hostage for several hours before the mother managed to escape.
According to police, the mother contacted a construction crew and requested that they call 911. They added that she had minor injuries and it remains unclear how she managed to escape.
In a press conference on Friday, Surprise police spokesperson Rick Hernandez said: “She believed the baby was in danger … Officers responded to the residence and, upon arrival, they heard multiple rounds of gunfire coming from inside the residence.”
Hernandez continued: “That was when the officers forced entry. Upon forced entry, our understanding is that officers almost immediately located the injured child, took that injured child and got the child to care.”
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“That baby sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was airlifted to a nearby hospital with serious injuries,” he said, adding that the child’s injuries, which were in its lower extremities, were believed to be non-life-threatening.
While police, including multiple Swat teams, were at the scene, the house caught fire as the child’s father was still inside.
Describing the scene to Arizona’s Family, the news outlet’s drone operator, Hector Holguin, said: “Next thing you know, there was smoke. And after the smoke, there’s a huge ball of fire coming from the back of the house and it just spread from the back all the way to the front … It just progressed. It collapsed the roof.”
As the house burned, a number of nearby residents self-evacuated when they were contacted by police while others chose to shelter in place, said Hernandez, adding: “As the incident progressed, many were asked to leave.”
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Firefighters were able to control the flames by using two ladder trucks to hose down the house as well as the house next door, and were largely able to put out the fire by 4:30pm, Arizona’s Family reports.
It remains unclear how the fire started or what condition the father is in. According to police, an investigation remains under way and the father is not in custody.
“Once the [tactical units] get the clearance to go into that residence, we might have an update on him,” Hernandez said.
It was the image that launched a social media sensation: football superstars Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi hunched over a chess game set atop Louis Vuitton’s signature luggage.
That 2022 campaign image broke the record at the time for most likes on Instagram. Now the world’s biggest luxury house, with more than €20bn in annual sales, is looking to capitalise once again on one of the sporting world’s biggest duos in a new campaign featuring rival tennis virtuosos Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
The pairing is a coup for Vuitton chief executive Pietro Beccari. It has been just over a year since he took on one of the luxury sector’s biggest jobs with a mandate to further grow the LVMH-owned brand — which had its origins as a 19th-century luggage-maker — by transforming it into a cultural juggernaut.
“There is no household in the world that doesn’t have [contact with] Louis Vuitton products,” Beccari tells the FT in a video interview from Paris. “There are not a lot of brands that can say they enter the lives of people like we do.”
We are already active in lifestyle and believe we need to be about much more than just buying bags’
Beccari is not just talking about sales of handbags and ready-to-wear fashion — though those more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, according to estimates from HSBC. Now, under the guidance of LVMH chief executive Bernard Arnault and Beccari’s leadership, Louis Vuitton is further pushing back luxury’s boundaries in a bid to reach an ever-wider audience.
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“We are in books, in writing, in editing. We are in music,” the 56-year-old Italian executive says. “We are very much in sports . . . so we are very much covering a spectrum of life that interests people. It is like a magnet for them to become attracted to the brand.”
For Beccari, however, weaving a deepening web of overlaps between popular culture, entertainment and brand identity is strategic and key to the megabrand’s future: “For every show Pharrell has done so far, we have always had new songs coming out” — the latest of which was produced for Miley Cyrus and played for the first time at Louis Vuitton’s latest autumn/winter 2024 menswear show.
Within the same season, “Pharrell also launched the cowboy hat and now you’re seeing that in the US just about everywhere. Even Beyoncé has an album supporting cowboy culture [for which Pharrell has also written a few songs]”, says Beccari. “These are examples of our brand in luxury, not just in selling bags, but having an influence on culture.”
However, the increasing ubiquity of Louis Vuitton presents its own challenge as the brand attempts to balance accessibility against losing the veneer of exclusivity that is essential to commanding the prestige and price points of luxury. “We’ll see if I’m good at it or not in two to three years . . . but this is an eternal dilemma,” says Beccari.
Louis Vuitton’s control of its distribution network and policy of never discounting its products are another advantage, according to Beccari. He also points to its care system, which allows customers to bring back products purchased from the brand to be repaired.
“We need to preserve our desirability despite our visibility and that’s the biggest challenge that we have,” Beccari says. “We are making sure that the levers we put in place will pay off in the long term, and I believe that this campaign [with Nadal and Federer] will help increase the desirability of the brand in the long run.”
Still, taking Louis Vuitton to the next level is being made more challenging due to a sector-wide slowdown in luxury sales following a multi-year boom during the pandemic. Brands with a broader, more aspirational client base such as Louis Vuitton have been hit harder by the slowdown than competitors like Hermès, which cater to the top tier of wealthy clients.
The darkening outlook in the key Chinese market, which fuelled growth for much of the past decade, also presents a challenge to the sector as a whole. “Beccari comes at a pretty difficult time because the industry is going through quite a bit of a slowdown, and notably the rebound in Chinese consumption is not at the level most industry managers would have hoped for a few months ago,” says Erwan Rambourg, global head of consumer and retail research at HSBC.
We sell excellence, quality, success and optimism. In a way, the notion of travel and adventure in life is a mirror of that’
Beccari, however, has a naturally competitive nature, having previously been a professional footballer in Italy’s second division in his early life, as well as a coach. Born in a small town in Italy’s Parma region, Beccari was recruited to LVMH from mass market shampoo-maker Henkel in 2006.
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He quickly rose through the ranks at the luxury group, first leading fashion brand Fendi before being appointed CEO of Dior, the group’s second-biggest brand by sales, in 2018. Under his leadership, Dior’s sales quadrupled, according to HSBC estimates, by expanding its market share across women’s and men’s fashion, leather goods, jewellery and homewares. He also oversaw the renovation of Dior’s flagship at 30 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, which includes a museum, restaurant and private suite.
Beccari has similar ambitions to leverage Louis Vuitton’s pedigree to expand its offering in hospitality. It already operates an airport lounge in Doha and restaurants in Osaka, Chengdu and Seoul. A large-scale project on Paris’s Champs Elysées, still currently under construction, is widely expected to include a Louis Vuitton-branded hotel.
With Federer and Nadal, Beccari is making good on a project he first conceived back in 2007, when he was executive vice-president of marketing and communications at Louis Vuitton, with Antoine Arnault, Bernard Arnault’s eldest son and then-director of communications at Louis Vuitton.
It is a revival of the Core Values campaign that first began in 2007 and ran into the 2010s. The latest iteration shows Federer and Nadal, photographed by Annie Leibovitz, trekking through the jagged peaks of Italy’s Dolomites mountain range, both sporting branded backpacks (Federer in a classic monogram Christopher style and Nadal in a monogram Eclipse version).
Was it difficult getting the two superstars together? “Not at all,” insists Beccari. “They are good friends and see each other privately. It was a rivalry that became a friendship. They are proud of it and I think they set an incredible example.”
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“We sell excellence, quality, success and optimism. In a way, the notion of travel and adventure in life is a mirror of that,” Beccari continues, and the driving force behind LVMH’s sponsorship of this summer’s Paris Olympics.
For the executive, Nadal and Federer epitomise the Olympic spirit. “I think nobody more than them represents this extreme, ferocious competition that becomes friendship, which is exactly what sports should be.”
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