I made this pie weeks ago. Maybe months now? At the time, I was living in a lot of fear of exposing myself or others to the virus. Those fears are still there, but we’ve since adapted a little better.
As weeks went by without grocery shopping, I felt a more personal perspective on some of the stories I read and share. Eggs and butter became precious. I rationed my reserves of flour and sugar carefully. When I wanted a sweet treat, I had to weigh the benefits of using those ingredients.
Scarcity or preciousness could mean so many different things across time. I love these stories of course: an era when oysters were abundant and ordinary, a time when celery was a status symbol; nearly inconceivable differences in our relationship with familiar foods.
The Wikipedia entry for “Chess pie” offers up several possible explanations for the name – the pie is named for a piece of furniture called a pie chest, or for the town of Chester, England. Some theories are just silly. “It’s jes’ pie.” Okay… whatever.
The likely explanation is that “chess pie” evolved from recipes like this recipe for “cheese cakes” and that the “cheese” morphed into “chess,” possibly due to the confusing lack of cheese in the filling.
These are not quite like the “cheese cakes” Elizabeth Ellicott Lea included in her 1845 cookbook. Lea’s cheesecakes are made from curd and combined with pulverized almonds and flavorings. This recipe, on the other hand, contains no actual cheese and very little dairy- but it is easy to see the similarity. The basic formula was very popular in British cookbooks at the time.
Many “cheese cake” recipes contain pulverized almonds. Some recipes, such as the one in Hannah Glasse’s 1786 “The Art of Cookery,” include the peel of the lemon, cooked and blended into the custard. Others present the pie filling as a preserved product that you can keep in a jar for a year before baking into a pie. A second recipe included in Glasse’s book appears to be a direct antecedent to Mrs. Schley’s recipe – a very tasty recipe, I might add.
Part of what remains of Conococheague Manor Manor, the Ringgold estate in Washington County. Maryland Historical Trust
“Strawberry Pretzel Salad” is the stuff of potluck legend. Fruit; Jell-o; creamy whipped filling; and then – surprise! – a crunchy salty bottom-crust. It requires just enough assembly to be special. It’s quirky enough to be memorable. It’s the kind of “Suzie Homemaker” recipe that gets frequently requested from newspapers, and that people love to claim is of their own inspired invention.
Pretzels used as a crumb crust for pies may not be as ubiquitous as graham crackers, but the idea is not unheard of. 1950s recipe columns encouraged home cooks to give pretzel crust a try. “Sounds dizzy but tastes great,” the Orlando Sentinel declared in 1953. The Warren County Observer in Pennsylvania promised readers that they would “say it has a crunchiness and toasty taste that’s perfect for a lemon meringue pie” in 1954. Pretzel crust lemon chiffon pie became a new twist on lemon pie and other desserts.
Many online sources incorrectly state that the salad originated with the 1963 “Joys of Jell-o” cookbook. L.M. Zoller of the “I’ll Make It Myself” food blog wrote a great little zine on the topic and debunked this. L.M. noted that the earliest known (as of this post) instance of the dish in the 1960 “Brentwood Civic Club Cookbook” from Brentwood Pennsylvania, contributed by Gerry Franz Sullivan, a daughter of second-generation German immigrants in the Pittsburgh area.
Some sources also refer to this as a “Southern” dish for whatever reason, but we won’t bother with that. I believe that the layered strawberry concept may have appeared in Jell-o recipe books – but the pivotal flourish- the pretzel crust – was not included. Without that it’s just a Jell-o fruit salad.
The first newspaper appearance of Strawberry Pretzel Salad that I found was in 1972, in the Chicago Tribune, as “Pretzel-Crust Strawberry Dessert,” attributed to Mrs. Paul Meiners. I can’t identify Mrs. Meiners for certain, but I found a Paul Meiners in the Chicago area, the son of German immigrants.
In June 1974 the recipe appeared in the Bemidji, Minnesota Pioneer “Cooking with Candace” column under the more fetching name “Strawberry Pretzel Surprise.”
It may surprise you to know that one of the most popular recipes in the Old Line Plate database doesn’t contain oysters, crab, or even chicken. As I’ve spent hours poring over community cookbooks and dusty manuscripts, I started to notice a ubiquitous pie that appeared in cookbooks – often in multiple forms. As of May 2019, I’ve collected 170 recipes for lemon pie.
For comparison, I have about 50 recipes for apple pies. 37 for White Potato Pie. I haven’t indexed every Maryland cookbook, but I don’t think that white potato is going to catch up to lemon any time soon.
I was recently at the Pratt Library paging through “How We Cook in Salisbury,” a late 1930’s cookbook put out by the St. Peter’s Church (in Salisbury, obviously), when I came across an especially amusing arrangement of lemon pie recipes.
One page had a recipe from Mrs. David Dallas, for “Lemon Pie.” Directly below that recipe was one from Mrs. A. Percy White, entitled “Superior Lemon Pie.”
How we cook in Salisbury, edited by the Woman’s guild of St.Peter’s church, Salisbury at the Enoch Pratt Library
“The fame of the Maryland apple is perhaps less known at home than in distant markets. The Maryland apple has never figured to any great extent in the lobster palaces in the Broadway section in New York at $1 per apple. It is a good apple, nevertheless.” – The Baltimore Sun, 1911
A Baltimore fruit merchant, U. Grant Border, posed a fascinating question in 1913: “Can King Apple be so advertised as to increase the consumption from year to year sufficiently to provide a profitable market for the great and steadily-increasing crops?” He believed that the answer was yes, and started a plan to form a sort of fund for apple-farmers to pool their money for national advertising campaigns.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” had been an old Welsh adage for a few decades by that time. Originally it has the somewhat more spiteful wording “eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”
Grant, now a bona-fide “ad man,” continued to tout the health benefits of the apple, but he took it a step beyond. In 1912 he was quoted in many newspapers declaring that women should eat apples “morning, noon and night” to make their complexions more beautiful.
His organization, the International Apple Shippers Association, declared October 31st “Apple Day.” When that wasn’t good enough, they dedicated an entire Apple Week. The Baltimore Fruit Producers’ Association held an event where they gave away 1000 apples. In two of the apples was a $5 gold piece. (That’s about $75 nowadays.)
Meanwhile, across the country, Lucy Gertrude MacKay was also making a career of apples. She had been conducting demonstrations on “apple cookery” since the early 1900s.
