Traditional Southern Chess Pie Recipe

bettyskitchen

Hi I’m Betty and welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today we’re making a traditional southern
chess pie and some of you might remember a few months ago, my husband and I went to
Shaker Town at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky and that was the place where we had a nice
lunch and I told you I would make something from that lunch and that lunch had a lot of
good things in it and I ended up making tomato celery soup and also made shaker lemon
pie and that’s the kind of pie that has the sliced lemon in with the rinds on it in the pie
and somebody didn’t like that too much because it was very tart, very tangy.

So if you want to try that I would suggest that you not use as much of the lemon peel but
it’s big and you can get used to it. Some of you did ask for the chest pie that was what
Rick ordered for his dessert and I didn’t get around to doing that so I thought well I’m not
having dessert for a few days then getting a wipe those in since Christmas so it might be a
nice time to do a chest pie. So here’s the way it goes. First you need an unbaked pie shell
or pie crust and I got these this morning form the frozen food section at the grocery store.
This is Pillsbury brand Pet-Ritz pie crust and it says two deep dish ready to fill under in
9-inch pans.

It just says fill it, bake it, take it. So it has a two in here that are separated with some wax
paper and you can see that there’s plenty of space because it’s deep dish and it’s in a tin
which is an aluminum foil pan and you can take it with you. I actually prefer to put this in
a pie dish now this being a deep dish type of crust on the deep dish pie dish to put it in so
we’ll see if we can work that up later. But have that prepared, it’s not the kind that is
pierced with a fork. You can buy those and bake them and fill them with cream pie’s and
so on but this is going to be baked along with the pie. So you want it solid so you can put
that filling in here and it won’t drip to the bottom holes that might be there so just make
sure it’s unbaked and it is not pricked with a fork like we normally do for other types of
pie crust.

Alright we start with three eggs and I’ve already used my mixer here to beat them so we
have three eggs that are nicely beaten to that we’re going to add sugar because this is just
some regular granulated sugar and I’ve used a different container to get out 1-1/2 cups
and that’s going to go in with our eggs and then let me step over here to the stove where I
have some butter melted. This is one stick which is ½ cup of butter and my spoon is right
here so I’ll just put this in and we’ll have to stir all this up just like that. I bet you can see
everyone have a nice blend coming along. After adding the sugar and the butter to the
eggs the next thing I have lined up is corn meal. That might sound unusual to you but that
is very traditional for a southern type chess pies.

So what I have, my measuring spins were one tablespoon and one teaspoon and I put that
on the container so I can show you how much it was so sprinkle that in. I’ll start in just a
minute and next we have vinegar, this is white vinegar and you will need, I’ve covered
this up but you will need 1 tablespoon which I have already measured out. Let’s bring
that over and then one final ingredient here for the filling and this is vanilla extract. You
need 1 teaspoon that’s my measure and then you want it sitting there because it will
probably rock around and put that on the counter so I put it in a larger measure. There we
go, one teaspoon.

Now just stir this around say a very easy pie to make if you can just get your ingredients
together and melt that butter, bake eggs and then just add one thing right up to another.
Stir it around. You do need to have it pretty homogenous because you have those eggs in
there and you don’t want to have a piece of egg and then something that resembles pie
here and there throughout your mixture. You want it all to be nice chess pie. I did make
chess bars before in case you’re interested it’s kind of the taste of chess pie but it’s in the
bar form and I have made pecan pie, it reminds me of chess pie but it has a darker syrup,
it has pecans in it so this is just your traditional southern chess pie.

And we’re ready to pour it in so I’m going to choose this one because it has no cracks in
it. Either a crack which I see in the oven actually, you can mend those, all you have to do
is use some cold water, take your fingers and press that together and so don’t worry if
you come home with something like that and if you want to make a home made pie crust,
I have one that is listed in Betty’s Kitchen and maybe a couple, and also I have graham
cracker crust if you prefer those. But you do have to have some type of pastry that you
can bake in the oven because you’re going to be baking this chess pie for 50 minutes,
approximately 50 minutes.

When I have a pie or something of that nature that bakes that long, I like to protect the
crust. So what I’m going to do is take some foil pieces, I always take this in my pantry
and that came from those large stores that sell in restaurants and so on and it’s this pop up
foil where you can just take a piece at a time and then cut them in shapes that you want.
And then if you will go around the edge of your pie like this you can crimp this in very
easily without touching the pie filling but you can make it pretty stable so that it doens’t6
fall off of the crust so I’m going to go around and protect that crust and then I’ll put it in
the center of the oven in a 350 degree oven and let that bake about 15 minutes.

Now I will be checking on it as it nears being done and I will take a clean knife and put it
in the center, if it comes out clean then it will be done and I will take it out of the oven.
So I’ll talk to you later. My chess pie has been baking 45 minutes and I just looked at it
and it looks done to me. You’ll notice that I left the foil on the hole time because I came
and checked it and just folded away a little bit and I saw that it was nice and brown so it
was not going to have a problem in browning. You’ll also notice that there is adhesive
aluminum foil up above; I just put that on it at the very beginning because I did not want
this to brown too much. It can be a little brown.

But our test doneness is to stick a clean knife in the center and it should come out clean
and that’s considered be clean so I’m going to get this out off the oven, remove those
cool pieces and let it cool down. You’ll see it later.