Bean pie wasn’t the only Nation of Islam dish made with the miraculous navy bean—there was bean soup and bean bread—but it was certainly the most iconic, not just in Chicago but in any other city with a Nation of Islam presence.
In Chicago it used to be that you could reliably pick up a bean pie on the street—along with the latest issue of the Final Call—from a fastidiously dressed male member of the Nation of Islam, who might proffer, “Bean pie, my brother?” Lance Shabazz bemoans this sales tactic. “One of my pet peeves is that when Elijah Muhammad was present, we had bakeries all across this country. They baked the bean pie on the premises. We didn’t go on the street, on the corner selling pies, stopping traffic. I find it embarrassing, because if you want a pie you should go to the bakery and get it. I’m talking about in New York City, where on major streets you may see brothers stopping cars at the light trying to sell a pie. We had the tractor-trailers bringing pies and bringing newspapers up and down the east coast. It seemed to be more professional.”
The late Lana Shabazz, operator of a renowned bakery in New York City, was probably the Nation’s most famous bean pie maker. She cooked for Elijah Muhammad and Muhammad Ali—and in 1979 she authored the cookbook Cooking for the Champ. In Chicago there were at least three Nation of Islam bakeries on the south side at one time, most notably the Shabazz Bakery on 71st near Saint Lawrence. Khalilah Camacho Ali worked in all three before she married Muhammad Ali, becoming his second wife. Camacho Ali is emphatic when she says that, counter to most popular accounts, she wasn’t in any of those bakeries on the day she first met the Champ, but that’s where she was working at the time. And he was a customer.