Maybe a linguistics professor can explain to me how cheese might have become chess as an English accent evolved into an American one. The colonial chess pie is similar but omits the cheese in favor of butter. The English and the colonists made cheese pies with cheese curds, sugar, eggs, and flavoring such as rosewater and spices. Perhaps it’s a mispronunciation of cheese pie? I just find myself wondering where the T went. It could be kept in a pie chest indefinitely without spoiling, so perhaps chess pie is a mispronunciation of chest pie.
Chess pie, with all its butter and sugar, lasts quite a while without refrigeration. Legendary southern cook Phila Hach offhandedly wrote as a footnote to her chess pie recipe in the 1970s: “Chess pie gets its name from chestnut meal, which was used in olden days in place of cornmeal.” So confident! Back in colonial times, which is when many people say chess pie originated, pie chests-stand-alone cabinets that often had perforated metal panels in the doors for airflow-were a common fixture in a kitchen. Another explanation replaces the waitress with a plantation cook. Some people insist that at some point in history, when asked what kind of pie was being served, a waitress answered, “jes’ pie” (just with a southern accent, I suppose). The origin for the name is just as nebulous and undefined. It all depends on the regional foodways and family traditions that a baker is immersed in. Some people see no place for cornmeal in a chess pie, but they might use a little flour. Chess pie always contains butter, but some people will forgo buttermilk and use evaporated milk or cream instead. Chess pie can be found in big swaths of the South, but also in Appalachia and parts of the Midwest. They’ll usually say something along the lines of: “Chess pie is a southern-style custard pie made with butter, buttermilk, and cornmeal.”
Chess pie recipe how to#
It’s such a popular question that one of the first things we teach new employees is how to answer it. From the start, people would walk into Petee’s, order a chess pie, then ask what chess pie is. Still, that hasn’t stopped New Yorkers from appreciating them. Before boutique pie shops started popping up in New York City, though, chess pies weren’t much of a thing around here. I had the good fortune of growing up in a pie shop in Virginia, so I’ve always known the buttery, delicious pleasure of the classic southern treat that is chess pie.
The resulting recipe is a cult hit, especially in our Manhattan location, where we’ve given this pie the efficient nickname “Chessame.” THE MYTH AND MYSTERY OF CHESS PIE The question that generated this recipe was pretty simple: What if we replaced the butter in a chess pie with a seed or nut butter? To me, tahini was the most interesting “butter” to try.
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