Camacho Ali, who grew up in the Nation of Islam, says she learned to make pies from Elijah Muhammad himself. “That came about because I grew up in his house with his grandchildren,” she says. “When my mother was working or my dad was working, I was with him and his family. They had us all working in the house, working in the kitchen. We served. We were taught proper ways of cleaning and cooking our food, and this was part of our lifestyle. That’s when we learned how to make the bean soup and the bean pie.”
The bakeries where she worked are gone now, but independent bean pie makers still come and go. “Things change really fast in the bean pie world, it seems,” says Peter Engler, who has made a study of bean pies over the years. When he first came across one in the early 70s it was at the Hyde Park Co-op. “I saw these stacks of pies. I’m pretty sure these were the Shabazz pies. I bought one and I think I was surprised that it was sweet. It was just like a pumpkin pie. I’d buy one every now and then.” Later, in the 90s, Engler bought pies from the now defunct Original Bean Pie Bakery for his coworkers in the molecular immunology lab at the University of Chicago. “Almost everybody in the lab liked them, especially the Chinese guys,” he says, which he chalks up to the Chinese appreciation for sweet bean desserts.
Such observations give credence to the idea that the bean pie deserves a fan base larger than just members of the Nation of Islam. And perhaps it once had one. There’s a recipe for bean pie in Imogene Wolcott’s 1939 The Yankee Cookbook, submitted by Mrs. Mae Bangs of Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, and it could pass for any of the Muslim recipes I’ve seen—if she only called for raw sugar.