Recipe #113 - Shoofly Pie
I’ve known the song for a while now, and then one day it dawned on me - these are actual dishes Dinah Shore is singing about - are there recipes for them?
Well, indeed there are! Both are old Pennsylvania Dutch recipes, so I looked for the most ‘vintage’ seeming recipe, the one I chose is linked above.
First I had to make the pastry. Now, me and homemade pastry have never really got along, but I used the recommended recipe, which was quite simple. I replaced the sour cream with plain yoghurt, just because, and it still worked fine. I managed to roll it out and get it into the pie dish with very little trouble. *shock*
The filling has two parts, the flour/sugar/butter mixture, which is a bit like breadcrumbs, and the molasses mixture, which is quite liquid. I used treacle - but I have learned that molasses and treacle are actually just the U.S. and British names for the same thing. I imagine this is what a treacle tart might be like.
I think I need a slightly deeper pie dish. While this one was the correct diameter, I had some overflow of the filling. But I persisted with the “layering” and had the presence of mind to place the dish onto a baking tray before putting it in the oven. Lucky, because my oven is not level, and I had a small spillage right away.
The recipe says to cook this at quite a high temperature for the first 15 minutes, then turn it down for the last 20 or so minutes. My oven thermometer was showing cooler than the recommended temperature, but after about 10 minutes I could smell the treacle burning. When I got up to turn the temperature down I checked on it and yep, there was a lot of overflowing, burning treacle. But I figured, I’ll let it do it’s thing.
I was a bit worried when I pulled this out of the oven. Scorched top, burnt crust. I looked at some alternative recipes and some of them recommend covering the crust with foil to avoid the burning - although I’m not sure how I’d achieve just covering the crust anyway. I let it cool as instructed - the top sank down a bit - and waited until after dinner for the final verdict.
I served it up with a dollop of whipped cream. The first slice was a mess, but the second was a lot nicer and made for good photos.
And the verdict? It’s actually really, really nice. The treacle is sweet without being too sweet, it has that... bitterness? to it. The texture is lovely. The crust behaved like a crust, the burnt bits weren’t that noticeable and the cream helped even everything out.
I think I’d definitely make this again, maybe trying a different recipe and cooking for longer rather than hotter. I went back for a second slice.