Putting the pie back in surprise

When Carlton Hughes was a teenager in 1940s Bertie County, North Carolina, he and his younger brothers would drive wooden stakes into an open field on their father’s tobacco farm. Then, they’d string up fishing lines and bait the dangling hooks with earthworms before setting out for the day. When they came home, there was a mess of greedy blackbirds, stuck waiting to be plucked and baked into a pie.

Unlike the two dozen blackbirds of nursery rhyme fame, the Bertie County catch was never served live. “My family was extremely poor, and that was about the end of it,” Adam Hughes, a 42-year-old pitmaster in nearby Edenton, says when recounting his grandfather’s favorite subsistence meal story. Still, there was a frisson of excitement beneath the pastry crust. After all, the boys had fished for supper without ever getting wet.

Americans this week will consume more than 50 million pies, with pumpkin—the nation’s overall favorite Thanksgiving pie type, although research data shows the South still favors pecan—accounting for about one-quarter of them. When it comes to pie, eaters tend to shun the unexpected: According to the American Pie Council, when Americans muse on pie, 47 percent of them think of the word “comforting.”

Yet pie was long associated with surprise. In Tudor England, cooks were so adept at concealing various fish, poultry, and meat under square pastry sheets, called “coffyns,” that one kitchen cliché of the time went, “if it’s good, ‘tis better in a coffyn.” More recently, 1950s home economists and food columnists suggested closing out Thanksgiving with Semi-Sweet Surprise Pie, made with rice and dried fruit, Cranberry Surprise Pie, textured with walnuts, and fake pies, filled with dime-store toys and candy.

Perhaps it’s fitting that pie twists survive in northeastern North Carolina, home to the state’s first colonial capital. In terms of ingredients, there is nothing outlandish about butter bean pie, a dish unknown beyond Bertie, Gates, and Hertford counties. But as with the game bird pie, its lack of frills is counterbalanced by stories so compelling that tens of thousands TikTokers this month liked a video of Adam Hughes spooning butter bean pie into a quart container.

The biggest surprise about butter bean pie for someone who’s never encountered it is that it’s not very pie-like. By far, the best-known bean pie in this country is the navy bean-based dessert developed and sold by Nation of Islam members. Similar in appearance to a sweet potato pie, that pie is enriched by sugar, butter, and milk.

Considering the racial makeup of customers and employees at Tarheel Bar-B-Q in Eure, where I first came across butter bean pie this summer, I was confident the side listed on the specials board had nothing to do with Elijah Muhammad. My guess was something akin to a vegan Cornish pasty, which I wish I’d imagined back when I belonged to an Oberlin College dining co-op. 

Not even close. Instead, what was served alongside my barbecue was a maximally delicious stew of summertime green lima beans, cooked until creamy; salty shredded ham, and plugs of pastry. A kind of country cousin to chicken and dumplings, prepared without any baking powder or bonus vegetables, it immediately shot to the utmost echelon of my favorite dish list.

Admittedly, I’m a sucker for peas, pork, and pepper, but when I posted a photo of butter bean pie to Instagram—where one commenter after another marveled at never having heard of such a thing—the masses were equally besotted. The most common comment was a variation of “I need this.”

Of course, the North Carolinians who originated the dish really did. “It was essentially a big pot meal to feed a whole lot of people for not a lot of money,” explains Adam Hughes, who makes butter bean pie at Old Colony Smokehouse, the restaurant he opened in 2019 to revive fading culinary traditions, including barbecue smoked over hardwood coals and collards picked by hand.

Hughes can’t recall what inspired him to add butter bean pie to the menu. “I think I was in the mood to eat it one time,” he says. “It’s just embedded in my brain from childhood, and it kind of took off.”

Comment writers far from Bertie County were similarly nostalgic, although they posted that their grandmothers used different beans or substituted egg noodles, depending on what they gleaned from their cultural heritages and backyard gardens.

Even in butter bean pie’s tri-county area, there are differences among households.

“We call it butter bean pie because my grandmother did, but we also call it chicken pastry in our area, and some people call it chicken pot pie,” Hughes says, clarifying those people don’t mean what Swanson sells in the freezer aisle. “If you go to the mountains, they call it chicken slick, or slippery noodles.”

That kind of variation doesn’t play well with TikTokers who look toward the platform for cooking instruction. Hughes received numerous emails from would-be butter bean pie lovers demanding an exact recipe.

“They want to measure out water and measure out black pepper, but that’s not how the old-timers did it,” Hughes says. “It’s so simple, you can’t mess it up.”

Or, if you do, maybe that’s the unanticipated fun of pie.

Hughes laments that his generation is the last to recall butter bean pie, but it’s a complaint that dates back more than half a century. “Have you folks ever tried butter bean pie?” Mildred Hill wrote in the July 24, 1958 edition of her “Strictly Feminine Slants” column for Hertford County’s newspaper.

Hill continued, “I’ve heard several people around here recently say they had never heard of it. Well, you’ve missed a treat…My older sister, Agnes, is simply crazy about butter bean pie.”

In fact, Agnes was such a fiend for the dish as a teenager that she raced home for a bowl after spending the day with pals, instead of picking butter beans as her mother requested. As Hill recounted, she found a serving set aside in the pie safe. “She took a big spoonful, and underneath the top layer was only chips from the woodpile.”

Surprise!