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Molasses Pie
Four eggs; one cup sugar; two cups molasses. Boil sugar and molasses two minutes, then pour off into another cup sugar. Flavor with spice, cloves, cinnamon and butter. Bake thin crust.
A late-Victorian molasses custard pie written in the shorthand a cook already familiar with the genre would recognize. Two things need settling before you start: how much sugar in total, and how hot the filling is when the eggs go in.
- The hinge: cool the syrupThe boiled sugar-and-molasses mixture must be cooled to warm, not hot, before the beaten eggs are added, or they will curdle and the filling will bake grainy. Stir the syrup into the second cup of sugar, let it sit until you can hold a finger in it, then whisk in the eggs.
- Total sugar is ambiguous"One cup sugar... then pour off into another cup sugar" reads as two cups of sugar in all, the second added off the heat to dissolve in the hot syrup. With two cups of molasses that is a very sweet filling by modern taste; cutting back to one cup of sugar in total gives a less sweet result.
- MolassesUse unsulphured cane molasses, the kind sold for baking. Blackstrap is far more bitter and mineral than what a 1900s pantry meant by molasses, and two cups of it will overwhelm the eggs.
- "Spice"In American recipes of this period "spice" standing alone often meant allspice, listed separately from the cloves and cinnamon that follow, though nutmeg is also possible. A quarter teaspoon each of allspice and cinnamon and a scant pinch of cloves suits this quantity of filling.
- ButterNo amount is given. Two to three tablespoons, stirred into the warm syrup until melted, is a reasonable amount for a molasses custard of this size.
- OvenThe original gives none. Start at 425F for the first 10 to 15 minutes to set the pastry, then drop to 350F and bake until the filling is puffed at the rim and the center only just trembles, roughly 30 to 40 minutes more.
- "Bake thin crust"A single bottom crust rolled thin, no top. Because the filling is loose and wet, a partially blind-baked shell keeps the base from going soggy.
- YieldFour eggs and two cups of molasses make a generous amount of filling: enough for two standard 9-inch pies, or one deep-dish. Each pie serves eight, as the filling is rich.
Molasses pies belong to a family of thrift pastries that carried American baking through the winter, when fresh fruit was gone and molasses was among the cheapest sweeteners in the house. Cane molasses reached the northern states as a byproduct of the sugar and rum trades and stayed on the shelf long after refined white sugar became affordable, valued for its keeping and its flavor. Recipes like this one, thickened with eggs rather than with crumbs or flour, sit between the Pennsylvania shoofly pie and the Southern chess and transparent pies: sugar, eggs, butter and spice in a thin shell, differing mainly in which sweetener the region had to hand. The instructions here run to four lines and leave the oven heat and the quantity of butter entirely unsaid, assuming a reader who already knew the genre.