The "Good Ole' Fashioned Shoo-Fly Pie" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Looking through the cookbook that my wife and I composed and printed 38 years ago.  Made the cookbook to sell in order to make a few extra dollars since we had three young children and with my salary as a high school teacher it was tough at times to make ends meet.  Carol rounded up all her family's and my family's recipes and added a few that she had developed since our marriage 13 years before and came up with 49 great recipes.  Being that we live in Lancaster County, long known for the Amish, Moravians, Mennonites and Pennsylvania Dutch, we figured the cookbook would sell.  

Our world-famous cookbook.

Carol typed all the recipes, laid out the book with some artwork and I printed it on the offset press located in my classroom at Manheim Township High School.  The book had 24 pages (6 sheets of paper folded) and a cover of index weight paper.  Title for the book was 49 Lancaster County Recipes.  We had no idea how many books we would sell so I printed close to 500 of them.  Someone warned us not to have orders sent to our home so we had to get a post office box at the nearby Neffsville, Pennsylvania.  We advertised in The National Enquirer and in no time we had an order for the book.  And, a day later we had another order.  Looked like maybe I would have to print more.  But, after selling 7 cookbooks, the project died.  Made a great Christmas gift that year for friends and relatives.  Well, today I sat in my lounge chair and began telling Carol she should make this again and make that again.  Wasn't sure if I wanted Rhubarb Crunch, Aunt Lillian's Cherry Cake, Carol's Apple Dumplings or Bread Pudding until I turned to the next page of the cookbook and found "Shoo-Fly Pie (wet bottom)".  I hadn't eaten a piece of Shoo-Fly pie for years.  "How about making a wet-bottom shoo-fly pie for us," I said.  Now, there is the "dry-bottom" and the "wet-bottom" varieties.  The dry-bottom version resembles a soft gingerbread while the wet-bottom is a tender molasses custard topped with crumbs.  The origin of the pie dates back to William Penn who was the founder of Pennsylvania.  He was seeking colonists to settle in the new world as part of his "Holy Experiment."  Encouraged by his invitation to persecuted religious groups, various sects of Christian Anabaptists-Mennonites and offshoots such as the Amish and the Brethren, emigrated from Germany and Switzerland with the first settlers arriving in America around 1730 and settled in Lancaster County.  Happens that these settlers were addicted to pies of all types and they ate them all day at any time of the day.  

Wet bottom shoo-fly pie

Wow, I really must be related to these people!  The most famous of their pies was known as the shoofly pie.  Those that settled here came to North America by boat and brought with them the staples of their diet which happened to be nonperishable that would survive a long boat trip;  flour, brown sugar, molasses, lard, salt and spices.  The women in the families, having to "make do", concocted a pie which became known as a shoo-fly pie.  The shoo-fly pie seems to be a variation of the Treacle Tart which was a British name for any syrup made during the refining of sugar cane.  As to the two versions of the pie, the dry-bottom is baked until the molasses is fully set which makes for a cake-like consistency.  The wet-bottom isn't baked quite as long, thus the stickier or gooier bottom. So, why is it called shoo-fly pie?  Seems the pools of sweet, sticky molasses sometimes formed on the surface of the pie while it cooled, invariably attracting flies.  As far as the recipe, I scanned the recipe from our cookbook and this is the same recipe that Carol will be using to make me a good old-fashioned wet bottom shoo-fly pie! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.