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Courtesy of Anne Byrn – Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen
About the Recipe:
Found in farm journals and church cookbooks, chess pie recipes were the easy, everyday pies baked by people who did their own baking. They needed no fresh fruit or refrigeration, and that was fortuitous, because before the 1930s, home refrigerators as we know them didn’t exist. Having spent a lifetime baking chess pie and eating other people’s variations on chess pie, I can confidently say this recipe is the best. What makes middle Tennessee chess pie different from that in other parts of the South is the cornmeal and apple cider vinegar. I grew up with little chess tarts at summer barbecues, packed in box lunches, and on the table at holiday parties. Because those premade tartlet shells aren’t so easy to find anymore, I make my own by cutting a piecrust into rounds, pressing them into muffin pans, then filling and baking. So good!
Recipe Story:
HOW CHESS PIE GOT ITS NAME
The words chess pie have prompted much head-scratching among food historians. Katharine Shilcutt of East Texas was told her ancestors baked chess pie and stored it in a chest of drawers, which calls to mind a variation on the name “chest” pie. Most experts, though, think “chess” is a corruption of the word “cheese,” because the baked filling has a creamy consistency like cheese curds. The late Bill Neal, chef of Crook’s Corner, pointed us to the last part of the Oxford English Dictionary’s second definition of a cheesecake: “A cake or tort of light pastry, originally containing cheese; now filled with a yellow buttermilk compound of milk-curds, sugar and butter, or a preparation of whipped egg and sugar.”
Virginia historian Katharine E. Harbury wrote in Colonial Virginia’s Cooking Dynasty (2004) that the Virginia chess pie, cheesecake, and lemon cheese didn’t contain cheese at all, and the name simply describes their texture. In 1891 in The People’s Press newspaper of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, “cheese pie” is the name given to a pie in which eggs are beaten with butter and sugar, poured into pans of pastry, and baked with a meringue in a hot oven, while a similar recipe in nearby Greensboro was called “chess pie.” The Piedmont of North Carolina had been settled by English Quakers, Scottish Highlanders, Moravians, and Germans who came down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania.
Taken from Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories by Anne Byrn. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen. Used by permission of Harper Celebrate.
To Bake a Whole Pie
Pour the filling in a 9-inch pie crust and bake at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees F and bake until golden and set, 25 to 30 minutes more.
Makes: 18 tartlets
pdf for Copy of Recipe – Nashville Chess Tartlets
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