Molasses Pie
Three eggs, beaten separately, one pint molasses, one tablespoonful melted butter. Bake on a rich crust.--Mrs. Dr. J.
Molasses Pie.
One teacup molasses, one teacup sugar, four eggs, four table spoonfuls butter. Mix sugar and eggs together, pour in butter, and add molasses.--Mrs. Dr. S.
Two versions of the same pie from two contributors, both written for cooks who already knew what a set custard looked like. Neither gives a temperature, a time, or a pan size, and the first is considerably sweeter and looser than the second.
- The hinge: bake until barely setThis is a custard pie in all but name, and it fails by overbaking. Pull it when the outer two inches are firm and the center still trembles as a single mass; it finishes setting as it cools. Baked until the middle is solid, it weeps and cracks.
- Temperature and timeBake at 350F. A 9-inch shell takes roughly 40 to 50 minutes. If the crust browns before the filling sets, shield the rim with foil rather than lowering the heat.
- A pint of molassesA pint is 2 cups. In the first recipe that is the entire liquid, bound by only three eggs and no flour, so it sets soft and very sweet. The second version, with a teacup each of molasses and sugar to four eggs, is the more balanced of the two; a nineteenth-century teacup is variously reckoned, somewhere between three-quarters of a cup and a full cup.
- Which molassesNineteenth-century Virginia cooks often used sorghum syrup or a light table molasses, not blackstrap. Use unsulphured light or dark molasses; blackstrap is bitter and mineral-heavy and will overwhelm four eggs.
- Eggs beaten separatelyThe direction appears only in the first recipe, which has no sugar in it: whites and yolks beaten apart, the whites whipped and folded in at the end. It gives a lighter top layer that sinks a little on cooling. Whole-egg mixing works and simply produces a denser pie.
- A rich crustA single bottom crust, pastry rather than pie dough enriched to the point of shortbread. Blind-bake it 10 minutes and brush the base with beaten egg white before filling; a wet molasses custard poured into raw pastry soaks through.
- ButterFour tablespoons in the second recipe should be melted and cooled before it meets the eggs, or it will set into flecks. Add the molasses last, as the recipe directs.
- YieldEither version fills one 9-inch pie, eight small slices. It is sweet enough that small is correct, and it wants unsweetened whipped cream.
Molasses pies belong to the family of Southern and mid-Atlantic "desperation pies" built from pantry staples: sweetener, eggs, butter, and whatever binds them, with no fruit at all. Molasses and sorghum syrup were cheap and kept year-round, which made them a natural base for a pie. That two contributors submitted competing versions is characteristic of Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), which Marion Cabell Tyree assembled from the manuscript receipts of some 250 Virginia women and printed largely as she received them, initials and inconsistencies intact. The result is a record of how the dish actually varied from kitchen to kitchen rather than a single standardized formula, and the loose, unthickened first version shows how far a cook could go when molasses was the cheapest thing in the house.