Shoo-fly pie is the Pennsylvania-German equivalent of baklava and has as many variations as a Bach two-part invention. My late wife, the art historian Leslie A. Williams, made excellent shoo-fly pie. This was somewhat odd, since she usually impervious to the charms and blandishments of the kitchen.  However, to her shoo-fly pie was a cultural not a culinary icon, the art of which she learned the traditional way from her mother and her god-mother, as she explained in the following essay. Not to worry; her fool-proof recipe is included. I am happy to report that my daughter, Leslie Lavinia Kate Williams, an environmental scientist, learned the art of the shoo-fly pie at her mother’s elbow with excellent results.

Christmas Eve Day 1997

Confessions of a Half Breed

There are two shoo-fly pies in my oven baking even as I write. This is part of my struggle for Christmas. I am 3/4 Pennsylvania Dutch and in my memory, somewhere near the base of my spine, there is a recipe from my godmother on how one should bake shoo-fly pies. I saw my mother bake these pies (I remember my grandmother canning and making soap, but not baking shoo-fly pie). I know now that these pies are the angels of aging and are full of the caramel that makes for cataracts, but what the heck, it’s Christmas. So I pull from memory (reading the recipe would not be in the Great Tradition) my version of the pie. At Thanksgiving this year, my version left out the always important second cup of flour so we had something like flat molasses pie which my husband (1/2 Pennsylvania Dutch) dutifully ate two slices of before it was consigned to the tall kitchen container.

To begin with, the butter needs to be room temperature, a thing I always forget, so I put the refrigerated, 40 degree Fahrenheit stick of butter at the middle of the back of my stove to give it something less like the malleability of a lead pipe. Dear reader, please try to remember that’s it there. I won’t. Then I rummage the cupboard for my blue plastic measuring cup which has gotten all coy and refuses to be found. So I look at the teacups which are shouting “Use me! Use me!” and contemplate a silvery metric set which I know won’t be right. Well, did my grandmothers Emma Billman or Mamie Leibensperger have measuring cups? No, probably not, so it would be within the Great Tradition to have two teacups full of flour and one teacup full of sugar to start. And meanwhile get down the two kinds of molasses from the back of the shelf — one very dark and purgative plus a more golden hue of Gramma’s (Brer Rabbit will do) — and put them on the stove to warm up. Also find a large egg or two small ones and put them on the back of the stove to warm up, because if all the ingredients are at room temperature the pies rise better.

And there at the back of the stove is my quarter pound of butter melting, draining into the burner well under my teapot in a golden stain of cholesterol. I pluck a spatula from the lazy-susan implement holder and flip the silver stick into a bowl just as it begins transmogrifying from a solid to a liquid state. Saved, pretty nearly, almost. I figure if I shave some cold butter onto the melted semi-liquid warm stuff, it will be just about a quarter pound or nearly. Exactitude was not part of the Great Tradition.

I measure the flour (2 cups, for sure) and the sugar (just one) into the bowl with the assorted warm and cool bits of butter, pinch in a bit of salt, and cut the whole thing together with my favorite fork. This is a great fork. It only has three rounded tinges, and its handle has that nice eighteenth century molded look. I bought a set of these at an auction in Ireland thirty years ago, and whenever I use them, I am looking at the estate things for sale in that lovely Georgian house, and my demi-luna table and the three-tined forks are new to me all over again. The fork is wonderful for cutting butter into flour, and since the butter is half melted, the mixture quickly goes into something looking like cornmeal.

Then I crack the eggs into another, a different bowl, and beat them to a lemony yellow with a stainless steel fork to avoid the taste of silver sulfide egg yolks can make. Ah, chemistry! Where is the teacup? I figure that if all the proportions are out of the same teacup, I’ll be OK. So I pour about a quarter of a cup of the very dark, purgative molasses into the bottom of the teacup. And remember just then that the next step takes warm water. My water filter man refused to change the filter this time because the firm doesn’t make this filter anymore, and my filter system is apparently so old and outdated that the next step is to have a plumber come and disconnect the whole thing. Not likely over Christmas. So I mop out the melted butter from the burner well, and wipe it (the well) dry. I pour spring water (Chippewa was on sale) into my teapot and turn it on to heat. Then I fill the rest of the cup with the more golden molasses, and dump the blend into the beaten eggs. This doesn’t look good. You would not show this mixture of streaky yellow and black from an overhead camera on any morning show. Now the water is steaming, and I pour it into the cup with the left-over molasses. It’s too hot, so I get an ice cube and cool it down to a temperature more compatible with the back of the knuckle of my little finger. Then I add a teaspoon of baking soda to the now not-so-hot water in the molasses-brown cup, and stir it very briefly, maybe twice. This is the critical part. The baking soda fizz is what raises the pies, so you have to work fast to get the whole thing into the oven. From this point on, I am racing against the chemistry of CO2. The not-so-hot water with baking soda goes into the streaky egg and molasses mixture, with one quick stir. Then a third (more or less, no time to measure) of the crumb mixture is dumped quickly into the brown liquid and stirred just enough to be moistened. At this point, the whole thing looks like a dog’s dinner. The lumpy, dark mixture is poured into two pie shells (deep dish from my local grocery freezer, not part of the Great Tradition) and then, the rest of the crumbs are sprinkled onto the top of the pie, to sink into the liquid as the pie bakes.

There is never enough room in my kitchen. I am working with two bowls, one each of dry crumbs and wet molasses, plus the two empty pastry shells on a 3×3 area by my sink next to the stove. One shell is balanced on a burner and the other on my chopping block. And this is the moment for the great decision: should they be wet bottom or dry bottom shoo-flies? Dry bottom, you put more crumbs in the liquid for a more cakey pie. Wet bottom means you float most of the crumbs on top, so the bottom quarter inch of the pie has a molasses taffy texture in the final slice. I scoop just enough crumbs in to keep the bottom relatively moist: a reasonable, but undistinguished compromise. (My godmother, Maggie Ender, who turns these out for her hospital’s annual charity fete, strools all the crumbs on top for Maggie’s Wet Bottom Pies, all gone within the first half hour of the bazaar, but that’s back in Pennsylvania.)

The oven is on at 375 degrees, from memory. I turn it down to 350 just so I won’t burn the crust. (I have already burned two batches of Ms. Pillsbury’s best peanut butter cookies as a warm up for the main event.) And I am come upstairs to this computer to keep myself from looking at the pies for the next forty minutes. The CO2 doesn’t like anyone peeking while it works. When I go down again, I’ll take a knife with a pistol handle and slip it into the center of the pie to see if it comes out clean, no liquid streaks on the surface, maybe one little crumb sticking to the edge. And then there is the long, delayed-gratification wait, a Pennsylvanian Dutch form of penance, until the pie cools, because hot molasses is really not good for the stomach.

If I were home, there would be two cooks to watch, or three. And we would never burn anything, and we would give each other good, but slightly critical advice on just how to do things. My mother would have told me to put the butter stick in a bowl to warm it up. My godmother would have shown me just how to sprinkle the crumbs. Women cook now in the company of cookbooks or even videos. But there were always two aprons on the back of my grandmother’s kitchen door, one for herself and the other for her daughter, or a sister who might come by. I think, when they’re done, I’ll call my godmother in Bethlehem and tell her how the pies came out.

My Version of Maggie’s Shoo-fly Pie

2 cups all purpose flour, shifted

1 cup white sugar

1/4 lb. butter or margarine (one stick, room temperature)

Cut together with a pastry cutter or fork until the mixture is like fine yellow cornmeal.

1 very large or 2 small eggs at room temperature

1/2 cup yellow-label molasses at room temperature

1/2 cup green-label black molasses at room temperature

1 cup warm water

1 tsp. baking soda

In the second bowl, beat the room temperature egg(s). Add one cup molasses, in the proportion of dark and golden flavors desired. Drop one teaspoonful of baking soda into one cup of warm, not hot, water. Add the baking soda liquid to the molasses and egg mixture. Stir briefly.

Drop 1/3 of the crumb mixture into the liquid mixture. Stir briefly. Pour into two deep-dish unbaked pie crusts.

Sprinkle the remaining crumbs to cover and fill the liquid in the pie crusts.Bake for 40-45 minutes at 350 degrees. Cool for two hours before slicing.

Es schmeckt gut!