Program

Hungry for History®

Subject

Arts & Culture, Food

Location

345 E Church Rd, Telford, PA 18969, USA

Lat/Long

40.33164, -75.329614

Grant Recipient

Grace Inspired Ministries DBA Grace Inspired Living

Believed to have developed from an 1876 “centennial cake” recipe, shoofly pie is a molasses-based pie with a crumb topping that has been a tradition of the Pennsylvania Dutch since 1920. A thrifty dish, requiring no eggs and the main ingredient being molasses, shoofly pie is traditionally enjoyed at breakfast.

According to food historian William Woys Weaver, shoofly pie was the result of the “baking-powder revolution” that took place in Pennsylvania Dutch cooking in the 1870s, with its unique name evolving later in the 1880s (As American as Shoofly Pie, 2013, 256) under unclear origins. While theories exist for where the name came from, including stories of having to shoo flies away from the sweet, sticky filling, the exact origin has not been documented and is instead the stuff of legend. However, as early as 1881, the Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania newspaper the Times Leader included a reference to shoofly pie, describing it as a “curiosity” (Times Leader, August 10, 1881, 4), and an early recipe for shoofly pie was printed in the March 31, 1897 edition of the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Patriot-News.

A key ingredient in the recipe giving the pie its cakelike texture, modern baking powder was not available commercially until the 1850s, with it gaining popularity with home cooks as a leavening agent in the late 1860s. Shoofly pie’s progenitor is believed to be a molasses cake recipe made as part of the nation’s 100^th anniversary celebrations in 1876. Over time, the molasses cake was placed in a pie crust by the Pennsylvania Dutch, and shoofly pie was born.

In May 1920, Good Housekeeping included the recipe in an article on “Favorites from the Keystone State.” By then it was considered a quintessential dish of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In March 1923, The Ladies’ Home Journal identified shoofly pie as a staple of “Old Pennsylvania Dutch Cookery.” Harkening back to its believed origins, a recipe for shoofly pie included in the May 21, 1927 issue of the Pennsylvania Farmer said that the recipe “donor’s grandmother brought [it] home from the Centennial Exposition in 1876.”

Shoofly pie continues to be a beloved sweet, gooey treat in Pennsylvania, made according to recipes passed down from generation to generation.