December 24, 2022

Shoofly Pie

By roads-rus

Today I’m thinking of old holiday recipes after making sugared almonds instead of pecans. Tomorrow Ruth & I will tackle pecans and almonds mixed together for the holidays in a new-old recipe. Apple Pan Dowdy is out too. Both recipes are long ago favorites, not today’s treats for several reasons. Both had their time.

Shoofly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy are both Pennsylvania Dutch recipes that now use dated ingredients. Together they created a major hit record. Pennsylvania Dutch cooking used to be popular fare. I remember eating scrapple many years ago in Pennsylvania and not being impressed with it. Since then I have been looking for recipes to try for Christmas eating, and I thought that the combo of pie and cake might do it. Well, its back to the traditional fare for this year’s celebration.

Shoo-fly is basically a molasses pie that was once common as was what we now call Southern cooking that has caused Southern weight problems. Apple pandowdy is a baked apple pastry and a recipe from colonial times that is no longer favored by holiday eaters who prefer other treats. Today we use sugar. Back then molasses did the sweetening. Way back when apple pie was first introduced, desserts were created with either molasses or maple syrup. Both were popular sweeteners. Dowdying is now an old fashioned word. It involved the crust, breaking it up with a knife and pressing it into the pie’s bubbling juices during baking.

Apple pie originated in England centuries before Plymouth Rock was visited by Pilgrims. It started in France and the Netherlands and was brought to the colonies by settlers where it caught on as the American dessert of choice. If you like pecan pie, then check out shoofly, but you have to like molasses to understand why. In the early 1880s it migrated to a pie shell and stayed. Washington apples were seldom used as they are today.

The song repeats this refrain:

Shoofly pie and apple pandowdy

Makes your eyes light up

Your tummy says, “Howdy”

Shoo-fly pie and apple pan dowdy

I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.

Enjoy the holidays.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2022 at 8:12 pm and posted in Great City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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