Sugar,vinegar, flour, maybe some water, and if you’re lucky, a bit of butter and an egg. That’s the entire list of ingredients for a classicvinegar pie, which, depending on where you (or, more likely, your grandparents) grew up, will inspire fond memories—or perhaps some deep, bewildered revulsion.
“Vinegar…pie? Made with vinegar?” asked my husband, not merely a Yankee but in fact a born-and-bred New Yorker. He wrinkled his nose as I explained that I would be writing about this historically austere dessert whose meandering roots span from the deep South to upper Midwest—one that isn’t very far off from a lemon meringue or key lime pie in terms of tartness or of constitution.
More than onecooking blogand at least onecooking magazinehave suggested that vinegar pie, like so manyother resourceful recipesthat turned inexpensive staples into flavor-rich dishes, was a product of the Great Depression. But in truth, cooks were baking vinegar pies long before Black Tuesday.
“Its history goes much, much, much further back than what we think of as the pies that came from the Depression era,” saysKate McDermott.
A recipe developer, pie educator, and author of several books on pie baking, McDermott believes that vinegar pie got this reputation because it has often been lumped into the categories of“desperation pies,”or what she calls “kitchen cupboard pies.” Those pies rely on pantry staples and usually date back to the first half of the 20th century, when refrigeration hadn’t yet become commonplace and war and economic hardship required cooks to ration ingredients.
To be fair, retconning the history of vinegar pie doesn’t require an enormous logistical leap. Vinegar pie certainly mightseemto the modern baker like something that could’ve been conjured from barren larders and at a time when, say, fresh citrus wasn’t as readily available (or just always in-season) as it is today. The 2019 edition ofThe Joy of Cookingposits an entire genus of pies made with the bare minimum of pantry ingredients, which it dubs “transparent pies” and includes chess pie, pecan pie, shoofly pie, and sorghum pie.
“There is a whole galaxy of pie fillings based on brown sugar, molasses, and corn syrup or maple syrup,” the authors write. “These pies seem born of scarcity and frugality. In fact, they are closely related to so-called ‘desperation pie,’ which is made with eggs, sugar, vinegar, and not much else.” (Transparent pie—also sometimes called transparent pudding—was certainly a thing in the 19th and early 20th centuries in New England and Pennsylvania Dutch country, and across the South, though it lacks vinegar and more closely resembles chess pie.)
But vinegar pie is notstrictlya product of desperation. In fact, one of the earliest printed recipesappearsin Marion Scott’sPractical Housekeeperfrom 1855—nearly 75 years before the fateful stock market crash of 1929 kicked off the Great Depression. And it wasn’t included for lack of citrus, as Scott’s book also contains two lemon and two orange pie recipes, along with a bevy of other fruits and fillings.
Scott’s vinegar pie recipe is comparatively more detailed than many others in her book, offering precise quantities rather than the general guidance she provides for fruit pies: “One cup of brown sugar, half a cup of water, two tablespoonsful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of essence of lemon, a tablespoonful of flour,” she writes, noting that this pie is baked with a double crust.
A double crust, or even a lattice top, was not uncommon in vinegar pie recipes at the time. Another of the earliest printed recipes for vinegar pie comes froman 1859 editionofThe Lancaster Intelligencer. It calls for “a gill of cider or vinegar” (about half a cup), as well as molasses or sugar, and “half a dozen spoonfuls of flour.” Like Scott’s recipe, it calls on the baker to use a double crust, “or put the top crust on in strips if it is liked better.”
To be sure, those early pies were fairly spartan affairs—even though theHand Book of Practical Receiptsfrom 1860 reassures readers thatits versionof vinegar pie, with a fatless filling that’s quite similar to Scott’s, “is delicious.”
“Later, it lightened up some,” says McDermott. “Then people were putting in eggs, and people were putting in more sugar. I think by the 1920s it was actually quite a sweet pie—much sweeter than [theLancaster Intelligencerrecipe] of the mid-19th century.”
While Scott’s recipe merely contains a hint of vinegar,a recipefrom an 1869 issue ofArthur’s Home Magazine疙瘩的讥讽,半杯醋per cup of sugar and no water—but it includes butter and egg to offset some of the bracing acidity. Toward the end of the 19th century, cooks also began to experiment with other thickeners than flour. The Royal Baking Powder Co.’sMy Favorite Receiptfrom 1886containsone recipe for transparent pie but a fullsixvariations on vinegar pie, both single- and double-crusted, with various thickeners including flour, cornstarch, and crushed crackers.
At this point in vinegar pie’s history, the historical record offers many more examples of recipes, but there’s little documentation as to how vinegar pie spread from one region of America to another. Scott’s book was printed by an Ohio publisher;Arthur’s Home Magazineand theLancaster Intelligencerboth hailed from Pennsylvania. It may be that vinegar pie was first popularized in this Middle Atlantic-Midwest corridor, from which it branched out to the South and upper Midwestern states. Wisconsin’s own Laura Ingalls Wilder mentioned vinegar pie in her first novel, 1932’sLittle House in the Big Woods,as a Christmas treat that her mother baked alongside cookies and dried-apple pies. Well before that, however, a woman named Nannie Stillwell Jackson documented a vinegar pie that was “so good” in an 1890 diary entry about life on her small Arkansas farm (in the appropriately titled compendiumVinegar Pie and Chicken Bread).
Despite its wide territory, vinegar pie never attained the renown that shoofly pie or even chess pie did—and perhaps its nebulous roots are precisely what has allowed it to be claimed as a local dish by Pennsylvanians, Appalachians, Southerners, and Midwesterners. That may also be why there’s no fixed ingredient list for vinegar pie.
McDermott tells me that she’s come across a fancified version from the 1960s that’s seasoned with nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, and enriched with sour cream, nuts, and raisins—a far cry from Scott’s 1855 recipe. In McDermott’s ownPie Campcookbook, she offers two variations: one with a filling that’s cooked in the oven, and the other that’s cooked on the stovetop and poured into a prebaked pie shell. “It would be more similar to what you would do with a lemon meringue pie,” she tells me. “Another way you can think of this is if you are in the summertime and you don't want to turn on the oven, then make the one on the stove top. Or if you don’t want to make the crust, well, then go and buy a crust—it’s already done.”
Meanwhile,Gourmet’s version from 1963 hews more closely to those found at the end of the 19th century, with a couple of eggs in the filling, a full cup of sugar in place of molasses, and a dusting of cinnamon on top.
While most modern recipes call for apple cider vinegar—most likely due to its wide availability and rounded, fruity acidity—you can certainly take a page from the desperation pie bakers and experiment with what you have on hand. “Goodness, I've tried it with other vinegars!” McDermott says. “This is where I go into my kitchen and it’s like, ‘Okay, what have I got here today?’”
