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 single-crust custard pie of the transparent family, with no thickener at all beyond the eggs. That absence is the whole problem to manage: the filling sets by coagulation, not by starch, so oven temperature and timing carry all the weight.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyWith three eggs and no flour or cornmeal, this is a straight custard and will curdle or weep if pushed hard. A moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until the centre is set but still has a slight wobble. It firms as it cools.
- Blind-bake the shell"A nice crust" is not specified as baked or unbaked; if raw, a wet custard risks a soggy base. Partially blind-bake at 400F for 15 minutes, then cool slightly before filling.
- MeasurementsHalf cup butter is 4 oz, one stick. Two-thirds cup sugar is modest for a chess pie by modern standards; later versions often use a full cup or more, so expect this one to taste more of butter and egg than of sugar.
- "The flavoring"Left unspecified. Lemon extract or grated lemon rind, vanilla, or a grating of nutmeg all suit the style; use about a teaspoon in the filling and a scant half teaspoon in the meringue.
- Beating butter to a creamWithout a mixer this needs genuinely soft butter. Note that here the sugar is frothed with the yolks, not creamed with the butter: cream the butter thoroughly first, then stir the yolk-and-sugar froth in rapidly, or the fat can separate and float as a greasy layer during baking.
- The meringueThree whites with three tablespoons sugar is a soft meringue, not a stiff one. Spread it so it touches the crust edge all round, then brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes, or under a hot 400F oven for 5 or so if you want colour fast.
- Serve immediately, and whyThe instruction is practical rather than decorative. A soft meringue on a warm custard begins to bead and weep within a few hours, and the pie has no starch to hold released moisture.
- YieldOne pie; no size is given, and the quantities suit an 8- or 9-inch plate, six to eight slices. Refrigerate leftovers; a custard pie should not sit out.
Chess pie belongs to the Southern family of "transparent" pies -- eggs, sugar, butter and little else, baked in a single crust -- and appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks alongside its close relatives, lemon pie and buttermilk pie. The name has never been settled: it is variously said to be a corruption of "cheese pie" (English lemon cheese and curd tarts being an obvious ancestor), of "chest pie" for the pie chest such a keeping pie could live in, or simply a dialect flattening of something else entirely. None of those explanations is documented, and all are traditional. What is clear is the economics: this is a pie built from what a household with a cow and hens always had, needing no fruit and no out-of-season purchase, and versions of it turn up under various names across the period. Its appearance here credited to a named contributor from Glendale is consistent with a compiled book of submitted household recipes rather than one written by a single hand.