Culture / Origin Story

A Fresh Look at the History of Pecan Pie

The pecan pie as we know it is very much a twentieth-century creation, so if you ever see a recipe entitled “Old South Pecan Pie,” you know it’s bogus.

by Rebecca Sharpless via UNC Press Blog on November 16, 2022

...made with sugar, flour, eggs, pecans, dark Karo, butter, and vinegar, from Mrs. H. W. Woodruff (whose name may have been Margaret; she has been sadly difficult to track). Well, drat. That sent me scurrying to do more research. To my relief, I found that I had gotten some things right.

First, pecans were shockingly rare in nineteenth-century cooking. They were confoundingly difficult to domesticate, and it wasn’t until agronomists figured out how to make pecan growing profitable that they started showing up regularly in recipes.

Second, pecan pies did exist before 1900, but they were cream pies with nuts in them, and they persisted into the 1930s. A good example came from Myrtle Mainer Neff, the wife of Texas governor Pat M. Neff, in 1922. Her recipe began with milk, sugar, egg yolks, and cornstarch boiled together. Then the pecans, “lemon,” and vanilla were stirred into the custard mixture. The whole was put into a prebaked crust, browned, and served with whipped cream. It was probably delicious, but it’s not PPAWKI. Folks in San Saba, in west-central Texas, made a big fuss over pecan pie in the late 1920s, declaring theirs world-famous. The San Saba Pecan Company offered the recipe for “Mrs. Bell’s famous pecan pie.” A later account credited a “Mrs. Smith.” But, despite the hype, the San Saba pecan pie was also cream-based.

So, Texans were eating both kinds of pecan pie in the 1920s: Karo based, and cream based. I still needed to figure out where PPAWKI came from. So back I went onto the Internet.

In 1942, Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings compared her “Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie” to treacle pie. Treacle, from England, is a sugar syrup that is lighter and sweeter than American molasses. And treacle pie, I discovered, is layers of treacle and crust. It was treacle tart that I was looking for: “made on a flat dish, exactly like an open jam tart,” an English writer declared in 1881. In London in 1905, Mrs. A. S. Peel instructed cooks to line a tart tin with pastry; fill it with “some golden syrup or treacle” thickened with breadcrumbs and flavored with lemon juice and rind; and bake. Pretty simple: no butter or eggs and definitely no nuts. But sort of like pecan pie.

I also found a complaint from “Deliverance Dingle,” an Englishwoman living in Massachusetts in the 1880s about how molasses appeared in everything in America but that “treacle tart . . . is an unknown luxury here.” So, hmm. Maybe molasses pie was what I was looking for as the forerunner of the Karo-based pecan pie.