“No one throws shade better than a Southern lady, especially one who can cook. ‘Oh, bless your heart, why don’t you portion off the ketchup or make sure the sweet tea is sweet enough?’ That means you can’t cook!”
“I found it!” While reminiscing about Sunday suppers church kitchens, and why she doesn’t think of herself as a chef, Erika Council was also rifling through stacks of old recipes. She was after a particular one for sweet potato pie, one that’s been made by four generations of women in her family.
Council helms Atlanta’s Bomb Biscuit Co., where she’s both the owner and— yes, chef. “I guess in theory I am,” she says, “because I cook food at a restaurant. But the people I’m inspired by cooked food for the masses all the time, and none of them were actually chefs,” she says. What she started first as a pop- up pivoted to biscuit deliveries during the pandemic and, in 2021, became her biscuit-centric restaurant with a lineage that’s an homage to her grandmothers.
Council calls her paternal grandmother “a Southern icon, hands down.” Mildred Council was known as Mama Dip, and her legendary restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was a beloved mainstay for almost half a century (it closed last summer). It was her maternal grandmother, Geraldine Dortch, and the church kitchen she oversaw at the St. James AME Zion Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, that vividly shaped how Council feels about cooking and feeding people today.
“I think about how impactful those people were on my journey. I’ve been inspired by some amazing chefs, but I never wanted to be the one who couldn’t work in the church kitchen.”
For Council, rich recollections of that small-town church kitchen and the community it nourished echo in the comfort she finds in feeding the “extended family” of regulars at Bomb Biscuit, the friends who now gather at her home for Sunday supper, and the passed-down recipes that stir sweet memories. Especially that sweet potato pie.
“The recipe is written down on a piece of paper that was taped to a piece of cardboard. It looked like it might have been the back of a box,” she says. “It’s my great-grandmother’s handwrit- ing and you can barely see what it says.
“When I started making the sweet potato pie, I very much made it how it was written. I make my pie crust from scratch, but my mom bought the pie crust. My granny used to make pie crust, but when she got older she started buying the crust, but it was always the kind you’d roll out and put in a pie dish, so you couldn’t tell she bought it.”
It’s “very much a special occasion pie,” Council says. “I love it because it’s nostalgic and makes me remember those special events and times when that sweet potato pie was always there.”
Get the Recipe
Image courtesy of Erik Meadows Photography
Sweet Potato Pie 
yields
Makes 1 pie
Sweet potatoes, mashed (“She doesn’t tell you how much, but I’ve learned it’s 3.”)
A can of milk (Council says her granny used evaporated milk.)
3 cups sugar (Council says she uses 21⁄2 cups of sugar.)
Half-stick butter
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1⁄2 teaspoon cinnamon
4 eggs
Parbaked pie crust
ingredients
steps
Council paraphrased while reading her grandmother’s sweet potato pie recipe. “I switched up some of the ingredients. I sometimes add a little cayenne to it, just being extra. But still very much the base of nutmeg, cinnamon, a little clove,” she says, adding, “Obviously you need a pie crust.”
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Bake at 400 degrees for 10 minutes, then 350 degrees for an hour.
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