Hey everyone, it's Dan here.
And during the holiday season, I have sweet potato pie on the brain.
And when I think about sweet potato pie, there is only one person I think about.
It is the one and only Patti LaBelle.
Her Walmart sweet potato pie became a culinary sensation. when it first hit the scene.
So we talk about her favorite sweet treats, her viral line of pies and why, even when she's out on the road, being the incredible singer and performer that she is, she'd rather cook than order room service.
She travels with her own pots and pans.
And while, of course, the episode focuses on food, it's got plenty of great music.
Of course, it's Patty.
As always, if there's a Sporkful episode you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat, send us an email or voice memo to hello at sporkfulcom.
Tell me your name, location, what classic episode you want to hear, and why.
Thanks so much and enjoy.
In my family, everybody made the best peach cobbler.
There was no competition because, you know, if you tasted hers and hers and hers, all of them would be delightful.
Let's get a little detailed here, Patty.
Okay.
What temperature?
Do you like the peach cobbler, like, still warm out of the oven?
You like it room temperature?
It has to be hot.
And then, for those who love the melted ice cream on top, that's cute.
Who wants a cold peach cobbler?
So you like hot peach cobbler with the ice cream on top.
Yes, when I can sneak a bite.
It's so good.
And would you put the ice cream right on top?
Right on top.
So you want that ice cream to melt.
Yes, to melt.
And I prefer melted ice cream when I can have it.
You know, like I even sit it on a heater or something because I love the soft sides.
Yes.
Ooh, I wish I had some now.
This is The Sporkful.
It's not for foodies, it's for eaters.
I'm Dan Pashman.
Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people.
Today, I sit down with Patti LaBelle, who's not just a music icon, she's also a food icon.
She's written best-selling cookbooks, hosted a food TV show.
She's even cooked for Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Prince.
In fact, she says she cooks better than she sings.
Patti?
Patti can sing.
Patty will talk about the role food played in the turbulent home she grew up in.
Share stories of touring the segregated South in the 60s.
And of course, we'll discuss the viral video that made her sweet potato pie a Walmart sensation.
If anybody know Patty the Bell, tag her in the video.
Patty!
Whoa!
In West Philadelphia, born and raised in the kitchens where Patti LaBelle spent most of her days.
Seriously, her mom used to offer to pay her to go outside, but she wanted to see what was cooking.
She joined her church choir at age 12.
By 16, she was in a band.
And at 18, Patti and her group, the Bluebells, had their first record deal.
That was 1962.
Since then, she's gone on to sell more than 50 million records.
Her biggest hit, Lady Marmalade, is better known as Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?
In 1995, Patti collapsed on stage and was diagnosed with diabetes.
She made big changes to her diet, then released her first cookbook, La Belle Cuisine, which featured healthier versions of many soul food classics.
It was a New York Times bestseller.
This past July, the 20th anniversary edition of La Belle Cuisine was released.
Now, at concerts, Patty's known for her stage presence.
Up there, she is in charge.
And it's the same in the kitchen.
Here she is cooking with Steve Harvey on his TV show.
It's done.
The fish is done, okay?
So now... God darn, Steve, come on.
Now we played it, Steve.
Other people be trying to help and all this stuff.
They guess on my show.
Steve!
Steve!
Give me the goddamn bottle.
Okay, we're here.
I'm trying.
Give me a knife.
Am I right?
You travel with your pots and your pans when you're on tour?
I have to, yes, because, you know, room service can be a little shady.
And so I don't give them a chance.
I cook in the hotel suite.
So tell me about your setup.
What's Patty's gear when you get to that room?
I bring my electric fry pan, like usually two.
And if they have a stove with their pots and pans, that's even better.
But I plug my pans up and I saute my fish and then I do my kale greens in the other one.
And dinner is finished in about 20 minutes.
So you got two electric burners.
Those pans, you know, with the little lid and you plug them in.
Right.
Mm-hmm.
And you have your spatulas and you have your... I have everything.
My friend Norma.
She makes sure we have a trunk with spices, all my spices, because you know you're not going to buy spices in every city, so we bring our own.
Everything is in that case.
But sometimes Patty's hotel cooking can get her into trouble.
Like that time she was performing with Arsenio Hall.
After the show, she made him dinner.
I made liver and onions, and security came up and said, "'Something's burning.'"
I said, "'Hush, honey, it's liver and onions.
You want some?'
And he said, yes, it was liver and onions and a salad and some cabbage.
That sounds delicious.
Yeah.
How do you do your liver and onions?
I don't use flour.
I use a little grapeseed oil just enough to shine the bottom of the pan, season it with sea salt, black pepper and I cook it like one minute on each side.
It's thin liver.
Right.
People overcook liver like rocks.
And most people say I hate it because they've never had mine.
Yeah.
No, I'm serious.
My friend Norma's husband despised liver because his mother used to make it and she wasn't a great cook.
He said
So Norma told him, please try Patty's.
And he tried it, and my liver and onions slams.
It's really good.
It sounds delicious.
I love liver.
And I like it a little rare.
Yeah.
And then you put it over greens?
Yes.
No, on the plate by itself with the sauteed Vidalia onions on the side.
And, you know, with a veggie or a salad or whatever.
And I just, like, I love liver.
Do you like chicken livers?
Oh, yeah.
I like just about any liver I can get my hands on.
Right.
I love chicken livers.
And then so you do the liver and the onions on the plate separately, but you combine them in each bite.
No, no, no.
I don't like to bite the onion and the liver at the same time, so I'll eat some onions and then I'll have some liver.
I don't like pollen stuff in my mouth like that, two things or three things at once.
I try not to.
But either way, it's good.
Does the food that you want to eat or whether you cook after a show?
Is it sometimes dictated by how you feel about how the show went?
Heck no.
No.
How could that be?
I couldn't do that.
The energy that I get from every show is so awesome.
I come back happy.
And the only time not happy is when my voice might have given out and I felt as though I didn't give a great show.
Then I'm sad and I go to sleep quick.
And when she's not on the road, Patty says she cooks even more.
Every day that I'm in Philly, I cook for like 12 people and it's only me eating.
But I love to feed the neighbors and I have people working in the house.
They always get a great lunch.
And I just love to see smiles on faces after eating my food.
Is that a similar thrill to what you get when you're on stage singing?
Yes, because on stage, I get standing ovations, and that's a turn-on.
And when they eat my food and they come back and ask me for, could I have a second?
And then could I take some home?
That's a real turn-on.
I love it.
And so I have little baby containers to give everybody, those little throwaways.
Not my real Tupperware.
I make sure everybody takes it home.
Like my son and his wife.
They're always running and busy and he's my manager and they have a little sweet baby and they don't get a chance to eat.
So I'll say, okay, I'm making food tonight.
I'm making some whatever they want.
Just tell me what you want, and I got you.
Patty's family comes up often in her cookbooks, where she shares a lot of personal stories.
Her book, Desserts La Belle, is full of memories of people she's lost over the years.
All three of her sisters died of cancer before the age of 45.
Patty still feels guilty about the end of her sister Jackie's life.
She told the story on Oprah.
The day before she died, she asked me to make her egg sandwich and I had just gotten off the road and the hospital was five minutes from my house.
And I said to my aunt because Jackie couldn't speak very well then I said Aunt Hattie may tell her that I'll make it tomorrow.
The next day, I made the sandwich.
I said, Hattie, I'm on my way.
She said, don't rush.
Your sister just passed.
And I held that and I still hold it, because it was such a minor thing for me just to make a sandwich, because she loved the way I cooked.
I miss my sister Jackie like crazy.
Food was always really important in the house when Patty was growing up.
Both her parents cooked a lot, and that inspired her to begin dabbling at a young age.
When I first started, well, making things that I called cooking, it was ketchup and hot sauce.
We would go in the little back shed and I would mix up a bunch of stuff and just of course not have the cat and dog taste it.
But I knew that I had done something special and I took it in to my mother and she said 'That's great hot sauce, baby'.
I know growing up, your parents fought a lot and eventually got divorced.
You've talked about this.
You said even that as a kid, you broke out in hives from the stress of watching them fight.
So was food and cooking.
Was that sometimes part of the tension or was that like?
What was the relationship between cooking and the tension that you were living with?
Well, the cooking and the tension, I mean, it did get serious.
I mean, of course, my mother had hot grease on the stove, you know, and my father would bother her.
And he might have gotten a little teaspoon of hot grease.
But the food kept coming and they kept cooking, and they kept loving each other but not liking each other.
And so it was fights all the time.
And I did break out in hives.
So every Monday, my mother would take me to get this shot.
But then we would have good food after that.
Is there one food or recipe that you especially associate with each of your parents?
The sweet potato pie.
That was their recipe.
But, you know, since I have my pies in Walmart, I tweaked it a bit.
What do you think would have been their reaction, seeing the reaction to the sweet potato pie Walmart thing?
Gosh, I knew my baby could cook.
Yeah, they would do a hallelujah on that one.
Yeah, they would love it.
Yes, the sweet potato pie Walmart thing.
This was the event that took Patty's fame as a food person to a whole other level.
It was 2015.
Walmart was selling a line of her pies and sales were pretty good.
But then one day, a guy named James Wright Chanel posted a video review of her sweet potato pie.
Greetings!
So...
I went to the store after I seen somebody post that Patti LaBelle pie.
I love Patti LaBelle.
Shout out to Patti LaBelle, honey.
Warning to parents, this video contains a bit of profanity.
James Wright spends the first minute of the video just trying to get the box open.
Patti, what you sell this bitch with?
Gorilla glue?
Oh, there we go.
Come on, Patti.
You better come out.
Come on, Patti.
Finally, he gets the pie out.
Oh, it's so pretty.
Look at that.
He cuts himself a slice.
Then he picks up the whole slice with his hand and takes a huge bite.
His eyes roll back in his head.
Then he takes another bite.
And then... Patty.
If anybody know Patty the Bell, tag her in the video.
Patty!
Whoa, yeah!
Bitch, I turned into Patty.
You turned into Patty after eating this.
Then, as if to prove his point, he starts singing Patty's songs.
How is it that two people who laugh together and love together sometimes?
Patty!
Go to Walmart and buy the Patty LaBelle pie.
Patty, but you are my friend.
I never knew until then, but I know now.
The video went viral.
For three days, Walmart was selling a pie a minute.
They had to scramble to get another 2 million pounds of sweet potatoes to keep up with demand.
Patty started doing TV interviews with James Wright Chanel.
She even brought him on stage to sing with her at one of her shows.
And clearly, a big part of why this video resonated is James Wright Chanel.
I mean, this guy, Patty, is amazing.
But that wasn't the only thing going on here.
To help me dig deeper into this video, I reached out to Adrian Miller.
He writes about soul food and African-American food history.
The first thing he and I discussed is a comment that James Wright makes in the video, kind of in passing as he's opening the pie.
Remember, support black people, black businesses.
Here's Adrian.
So that's a long running complaint.
I mean, going to the early 1900s, African-Americans will be making a good product.
It's out there.
But for whatever reason, African-American customers won't necessarily support that business and may even prefer a white entrepreneur who's offering something similar.
It's really messed up.
So anytime that there's a African-American entrepreneur really doing something well, there's always a rallying cry to support that business and help that person break through.
And Patty heard that rallying cry loud and clear.
She told Huffington Post that the spike in pie sales was showing people quote the power of the black dollar.
Another reason why this video resonated, it's not just any pie, it's sweet potato pie.
That was why the black lifestyle site, Madame Noir called the patty pie phenomenon the blackest moment of 2015.
Sweet potato pie and pumpkin pie are both descended from English carrot pie.
In the U.S., pumpkins grow more in the north, so you see more pumpkin pie up north.
Sweet potatoes grow more in the South, so sweet potato pie is very much a part of both Southern and soul food traditions which, as Adrian Miller explains, are similar but not the same.
The difference between Southern and soul food is that soul food tastes better.
Okay.
But if you want something more deep than that, first of all you have to understand these are shared cuisines.
So there's a lot of food items in common.
So I can see why people are confused between the two.
But I find that soul food tends to be more intense in terms of flavors and seasoning.
Yeah.
And the use of variety meats.
For instance, I think the big dividing line is chitlins, which are pig intestines.
You find that a lot on soul food menus.
I just don't see that in white restaurants in the South or elsewhere that often.
Right.
And is it fair to say that Southern food is more of a regional distinction?
Soul food is more like a race culture distinction.
I think that's a good way to look at it.
I mean it's controversial, but what I argue in my book is that soul food is really more about what African Americans are eating outside the South.
I argue that soul food is an immigrant cuisine where the old South is the old country.
And all these parts, the rest of the United States is the new country.
And like other immigrants, they try to recreate home through food.
Where does sweet potato pie fall into that spectrum?
Sweet potato pie is one of those foods that fall into the sweet spot of Southern and Seoul.
Right up there with fried chicken, mac and cheese, watermelon, to some extent okra, cornbread.
You know, it's one of the shared foods.
And give me a sense of how Patti LaBelle is perceived as a food person in the African-American community, in the world of African-American food culture.
What's the perception of her and food?
PSPP, which is pre-sweet potato pie.
She was known really as a symbol of kind of healthy eating in the soul food tradition.
Because in the 1960s, when soul food became really popular, you had a lot of traditional cookbooks and restaurants opening.
And that momentum carried on for a couple of decades.
But then in the late 80s and the 90s, you started to see a reassessment.
A lot of people were facing chronic health problems from eating a lot of rich food.
And I wouldn't say that all the blame is with soul food, but that's where it was often laid.
So you start to get this soul food, light down, healthy soul food and other things emerging in the 1990s.
And I would say that Patti LaBelle was really the first big name to be associated with that current of soul food.
That's Adrian Miller.
His book is Soul Food, the Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time.
He also wrote a new book about Black Americans and barbecue history entitled Black Smoke.
Coming up, more with Patti LaBelle.
She'll share her thoughts on the role that race played in the sweet potato pie phenomenon.
And she'll tell us about her experience touring the segregated South in the 60s.
Plus, she explains why one recipe in her new cookbook is perfect for women going through menopause.
As we go to break, let's hear a track off Patti's jazz album from a few years back, Belle Homage.
It's called Peel Me a Grape.
Just entertain me, hey, champagne me.
Show me you love me, kid, love me.
Best way to cheer me, cashmere me.
I'm getting hungry.
Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads.
Welcome back to another Sporkful Reheat.
I'm Dan Pashman.
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Now back to this week's reheat.
Before we get back to my conversation with Patti LaBelle, let's hear a bit of her performing the song.
If You Don't Know Me by Now,
This tune was originally written for her in 1972, but she didn't record it back then.
Over the years it's been done by Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Simply Red Seal and Rod Stewart.
But for my money, nobody does it better than Patti.
Here she is performing it live on stage.
If you don't know me, If you don't, you'll never, never know me.
Back in the 60s, when Patti and her group The Blue Bells were starting out, they played gigs on what was called the Chitlin Circuit.
The Chitlin Circuit was the nickname of a group of venues in the Northeast, South and Midwest where Black performers were allowed to perform.
James Brown, Ray Charles, Billie Holiday, and so many more.
I mean, they all play these places.
Patti hasn't forgotten those days.
She told Dan Rather about dealing with racism as she and her bandmates traveled through the South.
We rode through the hate.
We sang through the hate.
And we all grew into fine ladies.
Because you let that hate diminish you if you focus on it.
You know that's the way of the world.
That's the way most people are in this freaking world.
They ain't going to love you, boo.
So keep on doing what you do and give them a kind word and say to them, have a good day.
But Patty admitted to me that as much as she tried to stay positive, it was rough, especially when it came time to eat.
We carried our tuna in the car and sardines.
They were like 10 cents a can.
And we would have our little candy bars because we would go to restaurants.
Of course, we couldn't get in.
And sometimes we would go to the back, and that back food was like garbage.
But we had to take what we could get, and those were awful memories.
You know, riding through the South and then performing, and knowing that everybody is thinking another way than you're thinking, but you have to perform.
And then when you leave, you might end up sleeping in a station wagon because there were not many hotels for Black performers traveling through different cities.
Were those audiences mostly white or Black?
They were white.
And we were on the show.
We drove to California to start touring with the Rolling Stones.
So, of course, there was a whole white audience, but they liked Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells.
So we got over.
I mean, we were good.
But I knew that Mick was staying at some place that Patti better not think of staying.
So I'm curious.
Obviously, you've had to face down and overcome racial barriers in your music career.
Mm-hmm.
Do you feel like you've encountered similar barriers in the food world?
I don't think I have.
I ask because we did a whole series on our podcast about food and race in particular.
I did an interview with a woman, with a bunch of different people.
One that's coming to mind as I speak with you is a woman named Nicole Taylor, who's an African-American cookbook author.
And she talked about how she's from the South.
She came up, she lives in Brooklyn now.
She kind of wanted to do a cookbook that was going to be sort of Southern traditions mixed with all different cultures that she's experiencing in Brooklyn.
And she felt like she got a lot of resistance there.
Because people felt like oh, you're Black, you're from the South, you do soul food.
That's your category.
And they kind of wanted to pigeonhole her and say, like, well— You're a Black cook.
Right, you're a Black cook, and this book is for Black people.
It's like with the sweet potato pie.
We would go to the South, and I would be on stage talking about the sweet potato pie.
Everybody Black said, whoo, the white people—
They love pumpkin pie until my pie.
I have so many white followers now about that sweet potato black girl pie that I understand what you're saying.
Yeah.
And it's like they put us in a soul food category like we can't cook anything else.
You know, soul food is good, but we can do other things, too.
And it's interesting to me because your first cookbook came out in 1999.
The Walmart sweet potato pie thing was 2015.
Yes.
So you had been doing food for a long time.
For a long time, yes.
Before that came along.
You had the hot sauces.
You had multiple best-selling cookbooks.
And it seems like...
You weren't widely accepted as a food person by a white food audience.
Yes.
For a while.
Yeah, at the beginning.
Sure, I remember that now, yeah.
But you go through it and you just know that you must keep your mind on your product because you know it's great.
And one day people will say, yeah, you're right.
You know, they won't see color then.
People are so much gravitating to me in the singing world, you know, of different races.
And the cooking, it's gradually growing.
Because hopefully, gradually, they will come on the boat.
And if they don't, I'm still going to cook.
I'm still going to sing.
It is interesting to think that there's probably a generation of white people who knew very little about sweet potato pie.
And they're always going to associate now that food with you, that you will have introduced this food to white people.
And I have had people say that to me.
It's like we eat pumpkin pie.
We never knew about sweet potatoes.
We knew about sweet potatoes, but not a pie.
And that's a soul lift.
That makes me feel so good.
It's like I introduced something to you that you never thought you would eat.
And also, I mean, just pumpkin pie is just the worst.
Ooh, I don't like it.
I mean, just for, you know, am I right?
It depends on what you spice it up with or whatever, but I'm not a pumpkin girl.
Well, pumpkin hardly has any flavor anyway.
Like, it's pretty much you're eating sugar and cinnamon and nutmeg.
That's it.
But that was what some people were used to eating.
And they still eat them because I know there's some great pumpkin pies, but I won't eat it.
I guess it's a testament to the power of tradition.
Yes.
People feel like, well, Thanksgiving, I have to have.
You just have to have pumpkin pie.
Right?
And that's so true.
You get blinded to the taste.
Yes.
You're like, well, I guess I'm supposed to like this.
That's the culture.
That's the way it is.
Before I let Patty go, there was one last thing I wanted to ask her about.
There's a recipe in your new cookbook for a no-bake double chocolate eclair cake, which first of all sounds amazing.
And then in the book you say it's perfect when you're going through menopause.
Oh, well, chocolate.
Right.
I say it right like I know.
No, you don't really know.
It's like 25 years now that I've been going through it.
You know, it's not just that.
Anything chocolate like.
I'll sneak a Milky Way if I can, you know bites, because I can't have the whole thing.
But chocolate, chocolate Hershey's with almonds and things like that.
And I don't know if that's just because of menopause.
It could just because I like it.
And I do.
But you feel like your love of chocolate has increased since you started menopause?
I can't say yes.
I can't say yes.
No, I've always loved chocolate.
And that's like my main dessert, chocolate.
Anything if I can have a little bite.
And lemon bars or lemon meringue pie, those things I love.
And cheesecake.
And I'm not going to lie.
Every now and then I will take a whole Milky Way and eat it in like one minute.
And then I say, well, I'll just do more insulin.
Right.
I have to be honest with the people.
I can't lie and say, no, she never cheats.
Right.
Yeah, I cheat.
Right.
But it sounds like since you were diagnosed with diabetes, you've made some pretty serious changes.
I've made every change possible.
Of course, fried chicken is in my blood.
And whenever I would make the fried chicken, I would eat the whole fried chicken within the.
You know, if I cook it in the evening, by nightfall that chicken is gone.
So I learned I was diabetic.
And so I started steaming the chicken sauteing with lots of garlic, because the garlic and hot pepper will make you think that it's just like fried chicken.
To me, it gives my mind a good piece that I love.
And I stopped using pork and And like greens, when people do the ham hocks and the greens and stuff.
I'll do the smoked turkey.
And I'll do turkey bacon.
And sometimes I'll do no bacon because, you know, I might just want eggs.
But once in a while, you got to cheat because you got to live.
I have to live.
And my doctor said to me, Patty, whenever you feel like cheating, just cheat.
When you do fried chicken, are you a white meat or dark meat person?
I like the legs.
I like the legs and the gizzard.
Yes.
And the neck.
I love chicken necks.
The part, I also love the, well, my family is Jewish.
We call it the tuchus.
The butt part?
Yes.
Oh, I throw that away.
No, come on, Patty.
Oh, I throw the heart away in that butt.
Oh, you got to eat the butt.
I can't do that.
No, my mother-in-law used to love the butt.
Yeah.
No way.
I chunk it.
If I come on tour with you, will you save me the butt?
Yes, I will.
And any other parts you like.
Just come on tour.
All right, all right.
It'll be fun.
That, my friends, is the one and only Patti LaBelle.
You can pick up the 20th anniversary edition of her cookbook LaBelle Cuisine wherever books are sold.
And she's back on tour.
Check out her tour dates at PattiLaBelle.com.
This episode was originally produced by Anne Sani and me, editing help from Dan Charles.
Our senior producer is Emma Morgenstern.
And our producer is Andres O'Hara.
The show is mixed by Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
And this week, music courtesy of Patti LaBelle.
The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher.
Our executive producers are Peter Clowney and Daisy Rosario.
Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
This is John in the Kitchen telling you to eat s'mores, eat batter, and eat more butter.
This reheat was produced by Gianna Palmer.
The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me, along with managing producer Emma Morgenstern and senior producer Andres O'Hara.
Our engineer is Jared O'Connell.
Music help from Black Label Music.
The Sporkful is a production of SiriusXM Podcasts.
Our executive producer is Camille Stanley.
And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app?
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Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.
