ISSUE 75, OLD AMERICAN DESSERTS, Part 1: Shoo Fly Pie
Shoo Fly Pie
This old molasses pie associated with Pennsylvania blossomed into national consciousness in 1946 when Dinah Shore recorded a hit song (covered later in the year by the Stan Kenton orchestra) about home cookery. The lyrics Dinah Shore sang ran thusly:
If you wanna do right by your appetite,
If you're fussy about your food,
Take a choo-choo today, head New England way,
And we'll put you in the happiest mood. with:
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
Makes your eyes light up,
Your tummy say "Howdy."
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan dowdy makes the sun come out
When Heavens are cloudy,
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy.
The song combined two approaches popular in 40s popular culture: Americana (a kind to retrospective nationalism the became prominent during WW2 with the unprecedented success of the musical Oklahoma on Broadway), and novelty songs—a genre that included nonsense verses, extravagant imagery (like your stomach saying howdy), and silly choruses. Students of American food have not doubt smacked their forehead in disbelief in the mislocation of Shoo Fly Pie as New England fare, when its home was the Pennsylvania Dutch country of Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Ridge.
The first recipe for Shoo Fly Pie under that name appeared, as you might expect, in a Pennsylvania newspaper, The Philadelphia Inquirer for April 19, 1906:
The Philadelphia Inquirer would be the primary promoter of this pie as a local dish for over a decade, revisiting the dish repeatedly with tweaks and elaborations, while no other gazette in the republic spoke of it at all. This may have been because other locales knew the dish, or a variant of the dish, as “molasses pie.” Now most of the molasses pies produced in the 19th century lacked a crumb topping, and manny of them incorporated eggs, or offered formulae with different proportions of molasses and other ingredients. An 1868 recipe from Romney, West Virginia, gives a flavor of one of the many molasses pie recipes to appear in print in the era after the Civil War:
Because of the in your face sweetness of the pie, a fair portion of the recipes called for either vinegar or lemon juice to be introduced into the mix to supply a flavor balance. Two very notable departures of Shoo Fly Pie from these earlier relatives were (1) the addition of baking soda to the molasses, and (2) the crumb topping. It was the latter that became the signature—the distinguishing feature of Shoo Fly Pie—that made it stand forward in the 20th century while the molasses pie came to be seen as retrograde.