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Sugar or Shoo-Fly Pie
(1st Part) 3 cups Five Roses flour 1 cup sugar ¾ cup lard or butter Rub thoroughly. This makes crumbs for the top. 1 cup molasses 1 cup hot water (2nd Part) 1 teaspoon soda (dissolved in water) Put water and molasses together and add soda. Divide into 4 plates, then add crumbs on top and bake with under crust only.
A four-pie recipe with no oven temperature, no baking time and no pastry recipe — all assumed knowledge in 1915. Here is what has to be filled in.
- It makes four piesThe liquid divides into four pie plates, meaning roughly 8- to 9-inch tins of the period. To make one pie, quarter everything: ¾ cup flour, ¼ cup sugar, 3 tablespoons fat, ¼ cup molasses, ¼ cup hot water and a scant ¼ teaspoon soda.
- Pastry not included"Bake with under crust only" assumes you already have plain pie pastry lined into the plates and no top. You will need enough short pastry for four single crusts; the book carries its own pastry recipes elsewhere.
- Oven and timeNeither is given. A pie of this type bakes at a moderate 375°F for about 35 to 45 minutes, until the crumb top is set and dry and the filling no longer sloshes when the plate is moved. It firms further as it cools.
- Dissolve the soda properlyThe recipe has you dissolve the soda in water first, then add it once the hot water and molasses are already combined; undissolved soda leaves pockets of soapy bitterness. The soda also cuts the acidity of the molasses and lightens the filling slightly as it bakes.
- Which molassesUse ordinary cooking or fancy molasses rather than blackstrap, which is far more bitter and mineral and will dominate the pie. Sulphured molasses was common in this period and is less widely sold now; unsulphured is the usual modern default and tastes cleaner.
- Lard versus butterLard gives the drier, sandier crumb the recipe is aiming at; butter adds flavour but its water content makes the crumbs clump. Whichever you use, rub it in cold and stop while the mixture is still loose and gravelly.
- Wet bottom or dryWith this much liquid to crumb, some of the crumb sinks and you get a soft, gooey layer above the crust — the "wet-bottom" style. If you want the drier cake-like version, hold back about a third of the crumbs and scatter them on only in the last fifteen minutes.
- ServingCool completely before cutting; warm shoo-fly pie runs. It keeps two or three days at room temperature under a cloth, and is traditionally eaten with coffee rather than cream.
Shoo-fly pie belongs to the Pennsylvania Dutch — German-speaking settlers in southeastern Pennsylvania — and is built entirely from pantry staples: flour, sugar, fat, molasses and soda, with no fruit, no eggs and no dairy. That is what made it a winter and early-spring pie, and also a breakfast one, eaten dunked in coffee. The name is usually explained as a reference to flies drawn to the sticky molasses top, though that account is traditional rather than documented; a competing story ties it to a brand of molasses. Its appearance in a Canadian milling-company cookbook under the alternate name "Sugar Pie" shows how far such recipes travelled, carried north and west by settlers and copied into community collections until the regional origin faded from view. The Five Roses book, issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was assembled largely from recipes sent in by housewives across the country, which is exactly how a Pennsylvania pie ends up on the prairies.