Molasses Pie
Put in mixing bowl 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup flour and 1 teaspoon salt and mix well. Add 1 1/2 cups molasses 3 egg yolks slightly beaten 3 tablespoons melted butter 3/4 cup nut meats cut in fine pieces. When well mixed pour into the unbaked crust. Bake 10 minutes in a hot oven, 500 degrees F., to cook the crust and set the rim. Then reduce the heat to 350 degrees F. and bake 40 minutes. Cover with Meringue. Bake 12 minutes. Cool before serving.
A molasses custard pie in the chess-pie family, thickened with a little flour and set under meringue. The instructions assume a few things a 1920s cook took for granted.
- Pan size and yieldThe recipe names no pan. The quantities come to roughly three cups of filling, which suits a 9-inch shell with a raised rim; a shallow 8-inch plate may not hold it. Figure six to eight servings.
- The hot startThe 500F opening blast sets the crust before the wet filling can soak in. It works, but it browns the rim fast — shield the edge with foil strips if it is coloring before the ten minutes are up. Bake on a preheated sheet on a low rack for the same effect from underneath.
- Don't skip the temperature dropThe hinge of the recipe. Molasses custard held at high heat will curdle and weep; it needs the long 350F stretch to set gently. The filling is done when the outer two inches are firm and the center still wobbles slightly.
- SaltA full teaspoon reads high to modern eyes. If using fine sea or table salt, half a teaspoon is closer to modern balance.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cooking molasses, not blackstrap, which is far more bitter than what was sold as plain molasses at the time. Sorghum syrup is sometimes used as a period-flavoured substitute, though it tastes distinctly different.
- Nut meatsAn open instruction — pecans or walnuts are both period-appropriate, chopped fine so they suspend in the custard rather than sinking. Toasting them first is an improvement the original does not mention.
- The meringueNo quantities or temperature are given; the capitalised 'Meringue' suggests a cross-reference elsewhere in the book. Use the three whites left from the yolks with about 6 tablespoons sugar, spread so it seals to the crust all the way around, and bake the 12 minutes at the 350F the oven is already holding. Meringue on a hot filling shrinks less.
- Cooling"Cool before serving" means fully cool, three to four hours. Cut warm, the filling runs. Store at room temperature the first day; refrigeration makes the meringue bead.
Molasses pies belong to the large American family of sugar-and-syrup pies — chess, shoofly, transparent, vinegar — that gave a household a dessert from the pantry alone, with no fruit and very little dairy. Molasses was the cheap sweetener of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a byproduct of the sugar trade, and it stayed in American baking long after refined white sugar became affordable, partly from taste and partly from thrift; wartime sugar conservation in 1917-18 gave it another lease. This version shows the dish dressed up for company: nuts folded through the custard, a meringue cap, and a careful two-stage oven schedule.