Chess Pie
Three eggs, two-thirds cup sugar, half cup butter (half cup milk may be added if not wanted so rich); beat butter to a cream, then add yolks and sugar beaten to a froth with the flavoring; stir all together rapidly, and bake in a nice crust. When done, spread with the beaten whites, and three table-spoons sugar and a little flavoring. Return to oven, and brown slightly. This makes one pie, which should be served immediately. - Mrs. J. Carson, Glendale.
A small, very plain transparent custard pie, closer to a English lemon-curd tart than to the cornmeal chess pies of later Southern cookbooks. Almost everything here depends on not overbaking the filling.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThis is a stirred egg-and-butter custard with no flour, cornmeal or vinegar to stabilise it. Bake at 325-350F and pull it while the centre still trembles; carry-over heat finishes the set. Pushed past that, the eggs curdle and the filling weeps into the crust.
- "A nice crust"Plain short pastry, not puff. Because the filling bakes at a low temperature the shell benefits from being blind-baked until dry and just coloured, or the bottom will stay pale and soft.
- Size and yieldThree eggs and two-thirds cup sugar make a modest amount of filling, suited to a shallow plate rather than a modern deep 9-inch dish. The recipe says only that it makes one pie.
- "The flavoring"Left to the cook, as was normal in 1877. Vanilla, lemon juice and zest, or grated nutmeg are all period-appropriate; a teaspoon of extract or the zest of one lemon suits this quantity.
- The optional milkThe half cup of milk makes a lighter, more custardy pie that sets a little softer and takes slightly longer to bake. Without it the filling is dense and buttery and will look almost translucent when cut.
- The meringueThree whites to three tablespoons sugar is a soft, old-style meringue that will not hold long. Beat to soft peaks, spread over the filling while it is still hot, seal it right to the pastry edge, and brown at 350-375F for a few minutes only.
- Why it is served immediatelyAn uncooked-sugar meringue over a warm custard begins beading and sliding within an hour or two. The instruction is practical, not ceremonial; this pie does not keep well and should not be refrigerated overnight with the meringue on.
- ButterNineteenth-century butter was commonly salted, sometimes heavily. If using unsalted butter, add a good pinch of salt to the filling or it will taste flat.
Chess pie is a Southern and border-state fixture whose name has never been settled: it is variously said to come from "chest pie" (a pie that kept in a pie chest without refrigeration), from a drawled "jes' pie," or from English "cheese" pies and lemon-cheese curd tarts, which likewise contain no cheese. All three are traditional explanations rather than documented ones. What is clear is the ancestry of the mixture itself: a transparent pudding of eggs, butter and sugar, baked in pastry, is a standard of eighteenth-century English and early American cookery, and it survived because it needs nothing a farm household did not already have. This version, contributed by a Glendale, Ohio, cook to Buckeye Cookery (1877), predates the cornmeal-and-vinegar formula most people now think of as chess pie and shows the dish in its older, purer form: three eggs, sugar, butter, and whatever flavouring the pantry offered.