The young man who met us at the front doors of Muhammad University of Islam wouldn’t let us in. He was polite yet firm when he told us they weren’t making bean pies that day. But my friends Peter Engler (eminent investigator of south-side culinary oddities) and Rob Lopata (occasional Reader contributor) had just toured the Nation of Islam’s neighboring Mosque Maryam a few days earlier, as part of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s Open House Chicago. When they had asked about bean pies, their guide told them to come back during the week, when the university’s bakery would be in production.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In some ways Muhammad’s Nation of Islam diet was ahead of its time. He advocated eating unprocessed foods and mostly vegetables (definitely not pork) in moderation. On the other hand, it’s an extreme form of moderation. He advised eating just one meal per day, or every other day if you were strong, or—for those who could work up to it—once every 72 hours. “The European white race,” he wrote, “blessed with the privilege of eating the best food the earth provides, has taught us to eat the worst (divinely prohibited) foods. We eat all the time, three and four times a day. This is enough to wear out the intestines of a brass monkey.”
Though in How to Eat to Live he never precisely says why, Muhammad lists most legumes—lima beans, field peas, black-eyed peas, speckled peas, red peas, and brown peas—as among the divinely prohibited. The navy bean was the sole exception.
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.”
In 2008, as Engler was preparing to give a talk about the bean pie at a Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance symposium, he realized how hard it had become to find one. A number of independent bakeries had gone out of business, and Muhammad University’s Supreme Bean Pie had just gone back into production after a mysterious absence. With some difficulty he managed to get a half-dozen pies delivered to the conference through a semiofficial bean pie courier.
From there, she began to consider the merits of the bean pie as a potential moneymaker.
