The Real Shoofly Pie
My many church and ladies-auxiliary cookbooks from Central
Pennsylvania dish up some darn good Pennsylvania cooking and are my first stop
when looking to conjure flavors from my youth. I find that after getting beyond
the persistent “can of creamed mushroom soup” or the “catsup” that seems to be
dumped into everything circa 1970, for the most part these cookbooks hide many
simple but classic regional recipes first introduced to me by my mother,
grandmothers, and aunts at potlucks, holiday feasts and Sunday dinners. So when
I was looking for an authentic shoofly pie, I figured my fundraiser cookbooks
were sure to deliver.
Surprisingly, I found all the recipes called for unnecessary
ingredients like cream of tartar or King Syrup; and every one of them called
for eggs. Not the shoofly pie I remembered. It wasn’t until I got to Pennsylvania
Dutch Country Cooking by William Woys Weaver that
I found what I was looking for: a humble cake-meets-pie concoction,
distinctively flavored with molasses, with nary
an egg in sight. “Shoofly pie has no connection with any holidays,” says Weaver,
an internationally known food historian, contributing editor for Gourmet,
and professor of food studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “The pie was
a poverty food served exclusively for breakfast or in the evening with supper,
or as a field break snack with coffee. That’s about it. It was never ever eaten
as dessert following a meal, even though it is served that way in many
Lancaster [Pennsylvania] tourist [spots].”
Weaver explains that eggs were expensive in the 19th
century, chickens didn’t lay in the winter, and a pie
without eggs would have had a longer shelf life. So the pie was basically
invented to eliminate the need for eggs, being leavened with baking powder instead.
The use of eggs is only a development since the 1920s. Even more importantly, it’s
not shoofly pie unless it’s made with molasses. The bitter kick of pure
molasses, which comes from the
boiling of sugar cane juice, can make some wince with every bite, which may
explain the use of the more mellow King Syrup that emerges in many recipes.
However, molasses essentially gave the pie its name. More likely than the story
about molasses pies cooling on the window sill and attracting flies that had to
be shooed away, is the theory that connects the pie with Shoofly Molasses,
produced in Philadelphia and popular in the late 1800s when the pie first
enters the culinary timeline.
“Someone introduced [shoofly pie] under the name Centennial Cake
in 1876; where the genealogical line leads prior to that is somewhere in
Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, perhaps Centennial Rolling Mills, which made
flour,” says Weaver. “The manner in which the pie was introduced at the
Centennial remains murky because no one has a complete record of all the food
served there, but it was in fact a Pennsylvania Dutch invention from the start:
a crumb cake baked in a pie shell. All the earliest references to it in
cookbooks call it Centennial Cake. Shoofly pie as a name comes into the picture
much later around the 1880s,” he says.
Weaver also explains that shoofly pie isn’t indigenous to the
Amish or Mennonite communities that predominate in the Central Pennsylvania
region as many outsiders have come to believe, but belonged to the larger
Pennsylvania Dutch community. It’s believed a sense of U.S. pride among the
Pennsylvania Dutch—who were descendants of German and Swiss immigrants, not
Dutch—growing out of the culture’s inclusion in the Centennial celebration
drove the popularity of shoofly pie, or Centennial cake. As Weaver explains,
the pie became “a symbol of their American-ness.”
Two basic versions of shoofly eventually developed, “dry bottom”
and “wet” or “gooey bottom” shoofly. The translation of these two types of
shoofly pies is literal: one type of shoofly affords a dry cake-like
consistency beneath the crumb topping and the other bears more of a wet custard
hiding under the crumbs. The dry bottom is thought to be the original version because
this pie is meant for dipping in a coffee, while the wet bottom variety comes
about later—likely the result of a failed baking attempt not fully
setting the pie but still pleasing to the baker’s palate—and is more
popular throughout the Pennsylvania Dutch region today.
Although my preference is for dry bottom shoofly, I guess
I’m not a true devotee, since I can’t stomach crumbs floating circles in my
coffee, but I can appreciate the pie’s simplicity that originally appealed to
poor farming families. As I snoop around farmers markets and bakeries and chat
with friends and relatives, I find that shoofly pie is one of those foods you
either love or you hate. You’ll have to try the recipe with a cup of coffee and
see for yourself.
Molasses Primer
I like using mild
molasses, which is also referred to as first
molasses. The first boiling removes only a small amount of sugar and produces the mildest
grade. The second boiling yields
a darker second molasses, one
that takes on a less sweet and
a more assertive flavor. The by-product of the third boiling, blackstrap
molasses has the lowest remaining sugar content and delivers the most pungent flavor. Unsulfured molasses is most widely sold and is
made from mature sugar cane. In
contrast, sulfured molasses is made from young, green sugar cane that has not matured long enough and requires a sulfur dioxide treatment during the
sugar extracting process for
preservation.
Shoofly Pie
From Pennsylvania Dutch Country Cooking by William Woys Weaver
Shoofly pie lovers
should be grateful to William Woys Weaver’s
grandmother for obtaining the original Centennial Cake recipe from Mrs. Miles
Fry of Ephrata, Pennsylvania. The family had preserved it from the 1870s.
Pastry for 9-inch crust
1¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup sugar
½ cup unsalted butter
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon sea salt
½ teaspoon baking soda
¾ cup warm water
¾ cup unsulfured molasses
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Line a 9-inch pie dish with
pastry and set aside. Using a pastry cutter or food processor, work the flour,
sugar and butter to a loose crumb, then add cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. In a
separate bowl, dissolve the baking soda in the warm water and combine with the
molasses. Pour the liquid into the unbaked pie shell, then fill with the crumb mixture. Be certain the crumbs are spread evenly along the
sides; this will help prevent overflow during baking. Bake the pie in the
middle of the oven for 15 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 350 degrees
and bake 35 to 40 minutes or until the center of the pie is firm and cake-like.
Serve hot from the oven or serve at room temperature. Serves 6-8
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