As I took to the internet, I found the history of the pie is vague and spotty, but the old recipes are worth a read and yielded some fun surprises.

Nobody knows for sure where the name Chess Pie comes from and that leads to tons of speculation, some of it silly, some of it interesting but all of it unverified. Lots of it depends on the sound of the word, chess, to support the various theories, including connections to British cheesecakes and cheese desserts which were sometimes listed in the same cookbook recipe category as custard tarts like Chess Pie without cheese. In this vein, we could just as soon decide that Mrs. Chess of Chester named it for her husband Jess’s Cheshire Cat ‘jes for fun. So we won’t. If you’d like to consider any of it, click here for a taste.

What is more interesting is that Chess Pie is an American invention and a Southern specialty developed when electricity found its way into rural America early in the 20th century and more bakers could afford refrigerators and the dairy products that the pie requires. Sorghum and molasses were also more easily replaced by refined white sugar once it became widely available. Imagine having nowhere cool to store that opened carton of cream, or finding only molasses on the market shelf when planning to bake a tart. Recipes for Chess Pie contain all that memory and more once you start digging.

Laura found the Encyclopedia of Southern Cooking online which had a nice section on Chess Pie. You can read it here. It notes the first printed recipe in 1906 (although the one above is dated 1877) followed by a later one in 1928. In particular it points out that variations of Chess Pie such as chocolate, sweet tea and coconut, became abundant with the rise of celebrity chefs. I found white chocolate versions, citrus versions, and finally, a banana version in a 1980 North Carolina Dispatch newspaper online.

Having worked as a pastry chef, when I read a recipe I can see its possible faults before I even make it. The immense amount of sugar (a full box!) and the lack of ingredients to enhance texture and flavor in the 1980 banana version concerned me. So I made up my own. It’s a true delight. Here’s how to do it:

Nancy’s Banana Chess Pie

For the filling:
3 small or 2 large very ripe bananas
1 stick softened butter
3/4 cup dark brown sugar
3 eggs, separated
1/2 t. salt
1 t. vanilla extract
1 t. dark rum (optional)
2 T. cornmeal
3 T. all-purpose unbleached flour

For the crust:
1 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. nutmeg
1 1/2 cups plain graham cracker crumbs
6 T. melted butter

For meringue:
The three egg whites reserved from the eggs for the batter plus three more whites, a total of 6 egg whites all together
1/2 cup sugar

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter a 10 inch glass pie plate and set aside. That banana in the photo is how dark you want your bananas to be for great banana flavor.
2. Mix crust ingredients together and press the mixture into the pie plate evenly. Set aside. This would be great with a chocolate and/or nut crust too if you have a favorite recipe.
3. Beat banana and sugar until well mixed. Add egg yolks one at a time, incorporating well after each addition. Add salt, vanilla and rum if using.
4. Combine cornmeal and flour and add. Mixture may be a tad curdled looking; that’s okay.


5. Pour filling into prepared pie plate and bake until top is browned and mixture is set, about 25 - 30 minutes.


Cool completely on a rack. (I bake my pies on a sheetpan to facilitate even heat.)


6. Make safe meringue: Combine egg whites and sugar in the top of a double boiler, or use a stainless mixing bowl that will fit over a pot of barely simmering water. Whisk egg whites continuously over the heat, careful not to cook them by letting the water beneath them get too hot, until an instant read thermometer registers the whites at 160 degrees F. Tip the bowl of whites to get the thermometer into part of the whites that is a couple of inches deep. Do not let the thermometer touch the sides of the bowl.


Whip the egg whites by hand (if you can!) or in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a whisk until the meringue is stiff and shiny and holds a peak. Spread meringue over cooled pie and serve immediately. Will keep a day or two but the meringue will change in texture as days go by so it’s better to serve it right away.

I hope you enjoy seeing me in my kitchen in the photo above with my mom’s Cuisinart. It has a big crack in the base but is a workhorse that never quits. This context is what is missing for me in so many blog posts about food. You can probably find a lot of Chess Pie recipes and photos online, but not so many with a real sense of person and place, a little view into somebody else’s kitchen and life. Here’s the rest of my over-ripe banana paintings too.

All paintings of bananas above are by Nancy Gail Ring, copyright 2010, gouache and watercolor on paper

see also: Not To Be Forgotten — Shepherd’s Pie

1.  Make sure your cream cheese is soft and your spinach cooked and cooled enough to handle.  Here’s how I do it.  After cooking it in the microwave or on the stove, I put it all in a mesh strainer over a colander.  I use my potato masher to press out the water.  And then at the very end I also press down on the spinach with a clean dry dish towel.  It must be very dry!

This next photo shows just how dry I mean!

Doesn’t my son do a nice job of brushing oil around the pan?

Here are you main ingredients.

Now you cream the cream cheese.  I’m using a stand-up mixer.  Unlike what you see here, you should change from the
whisk to the paddle attachment.  Then add the eggs (which my son beat nicely as you can see).

Then comes the grated cheese.  Did I mention that seasoning and any optional herbs? 
I use maybe a half teaspoon of salt but this will really depend on your palate and the saltiness of the cheese you’ve used.. 
And yes I taste it even with the raw eggs to decide. 
Call me dangerous.

Pour half of your egg mixture into the nice dry spinach.  Mix it up.  Then press it down into your pain. 

Pour the remaining egg on top and smooth out.  It should look like more or less this when you put it in the oven!

Take it out of the oven when it’s golden brown but not too dark otherwise it will be dry. 

Cheers!

Jan Vermeer, 1670-72; Oil on panel, 72.2 x 59.7 cm; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

see also: Dining Room Art

sat perched on the glass shelf along with many other glimmering bottles.  I can still recall sitting on the swivel bar chair, my feet not touching the ground, staring at that it. 

Now, forty years later, my father poured me a shot and advised me to drink it “in no more than two gulps.”

The interesting thing is that unlike wine, whiskey ages in barrels, but once it is bottled it is done.  Which means that this 1957 whiskey was unchanged, and frozen in time.  It had not matured a bit from its days by the mahogany bar.

As I belted it back, I understood for the first time that whiskey is not about the taste in your mouth.  It’s the trail of burning fire left down your throat.

I had finally learned to enjoy the warm sensation and even took a little more. 

gather “these excellent and matchless recipes of our New Orleans cuisine … ere Creole cookery with all its delightful combinations and possibilities will have become a lost art.”

The paper deemed the city’s own cooks and housekeepers the best sources for the recipes, making the book a bible for not only Louisiana cooks but gourmets world over. There are more than a thousand recipes: complete chapters on Creole coffee, the bouille, Creole gumbo, jambalayas, and Louisiana Rice.

There’s a fine introduction explaining the traditional way French food is prepared, and a list of full menus for celebration as well as the everyday.

By 1922 it was in its sixth edition.  It was first printed in 1900 or 1901 with at least 10 reprints by 1945. It hasn’t lost its charm for cooks in over a hundred years. When Laura saw the photos I took of it for this post, she commented that aside from its uses, it is such “an intriguing object of the past” with its patina of age. This was an especially poignant comment to me in the age of kindles and other electronic reading devices. Books really are wonderful objects. I hope the pleasure of turning pages is never lost to us.

Incidentally the book I have lists its retail price in 1916. If purchased from the Times-Picayune Office, $1.25. If sent by registered mail, $ 1.50. Now it is new in reproduction only and costs a bit more than a buck and change but you can get one or an old edition here.

Here is a lovely Shrimp Gumbo recipe copied from the Creole Gumbo section:

Shrimp Gumbo File
(Gumbo File aux Chevrettes)

50 Fine Lake Shrimp
2 Quarts of Oyster Liqueur
1 Quart of Hot Water
1 Large White Onion
1 Bay Leaf
3 Sprigs of Parsley
1 Sprig of Thyme
1 Tablespoonful of Lard or Butter
1 Tablespoonful of Flour
Dash of Cayenne
Salt and Black Pepper to Taste.

Scald and shell the shrimp, seasoning highly with the boiling water.. Put the lard into a kettle, and when hot, add the flour, making a brown roux. When quite brown, without a semblance of burning, add the chopped onion and the parsley. Fry these, and when brown, add the chopped bay leaf; pour in the hot oyster liqueur, and the hot water, or use the carefully strained liqueur in which the shrimp have been boiled.  When it comes to a good boil, and about five minutes before serving, add the shrimp to the gumbo and take off the stove. Then add to the boiling hot liquid about two tablespoonfuls of the ”File” thickening according to taste. Serve immediately with boiled rice.

see also: Kitchen Library

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt in a separate bowl. Whisking works like sifting; it prevents lumps and incorporates a little air for a lighter product. Set it aside too. Remember not to scoop, then shake the measuring cup when you measure dry ingredients. Lift the flour into the cup with your free hand, then level off the flour with a knife or your finger. If you scoop flour and shake the cup, you will measure more flour than you need and the cookies may be heavier than they should be.

Add both sugars to the butter and mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Add the eggs, one at a time, only adding the next egg when the previous one is fully incorporated. Add the yolks one at a time, and incorporate each one fully before adding the next. Add the vanilla extract. Mix well.

Pastry chefs often refer to wet ingredients as “the wets” and dry ingredients as “the dries” for short. Sugar, like here, when added to wet ingredients becomes wet and is often included therefore in the term “wets.”

So now you know the lingo: add the dries (your flour mixture) to the wets (butter mixture) all at once and mix gently until just incorporated. If you are using an electric mixer, add the dries on lowest speed and mix only until just incorporated. Do not over beat or the cookies will be tough. Best bet is to stop mixing in the dries when there is maybe a little flour still to be mixed in so that when you add the chocolate chips, you do not over-mix the dough.

Add the chocolate chips and very gently fold them in with a spatula. Again, do not over mix. At this point, if you want to bake off a cookie or two (or three or four) just take ice cream scoop size balls and gently flatten them into disks on a parchment-paper lined, greased or nonstick cookie pan and bake at 350 degrees F. until golden, about 8 minutes or more. Cool on a rack. The rest we will freeze.

If you have used melted butter instead of softened butter to make your dough, you may have to refrigerate the dough briefly to get it to a consistency for forming logs easily. This is done quickest by spreading the dough on a sheetpan first, then refrigerating it. Check it every fifteen minutes until it is pliable but not sticky and too soft.

Now we will make the logs. Pull out a long length of plastic wrap over your work surface. Alternatively you can use parchment paper if you don’t want to use plastic. Parchment will require some finesse however to get the logs smooth.

Place a dollop of dough onto the plastic wrap, and then another and another.

It will look like this. From this doubled recipe, I always end up with two logs like this so don’t worry if you still have lots of dough left in your bowl.

Pull the near edge of the plastic wrap or parchment over the log until you can wrap up the log completely in the wrap.

The wrapped dollops of dough will look like this.

With both hands on the log, pull the log gently from the center out until it is even and smooth.

That’s it! You can now freeze the log. Repeat the procedure to use up the dough in your bowl. Most likely you will end up with two logs. For the full recipe plus instructions on how to bake it off, click here.

Next Saturday we will make and freeze the dough for One Badass Ginger Molasses Cookies. If you’d like to join me, have these ingredients ready for next week:

3 cups unsalted, sweet butter (1 1/2 pounds, or 6 sticks)
4 cups white sugar
1 cup molasses (for cookies with a more bitter taste, use robust unsulphured blackstrap molasses, for cookies with a lighter taste, use unsulphured light, cooking, or fancy molasses)
4 eggs
8 cups all purpose unbleached white flour
2 T. plus 2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
4 t. cinnamon
1 1/2 t. ground cloves (this may be increased up to double the amount if you are a clove lover)
4 t. ground ginger
1/4 cup crystallized ginger (available at most supermarkets that carry dried and candied fruit)
Turbinado sugar, or any large crystal sugar for baking

See you then!

see also: How to Freeze Cookie Dough in Logs

canvases that call attention to their physicality with their sheer size and surfaces that are nuanced, painterly, varied, layered, and gloriously worked, surfaces that represent the passage of time, the artist’s hand and his immense ambition.

The placement of a triptych on one curved wall so that it mimicked a feeling of surrounding the viewer was testament to the encompassing feeling Monet wanted to create with these oversize works. He is quoted often as saying that he wanted to communicate to the viewer his experience of nature, to say something about the space between himself and the thing seen.

I was struck by how many viewers stood before the paintings to have their portraits snapped with digital cameras, delighted by the smooth, crisp contours of skin and modern clothing silhouetted against the texture of the painted canvas.

There were also many viewers moving along the canvas’ length holding camera phones up between themselves and the work, the better to capture the surface plasticity up close. The atmosphere was lively with talk and movement, animated by the effect of these large works, and not the hushed, reverence in front of masterpieces that I had anticipated. Something about these objects was not only effective but also affective, animating the space.

I did long to be alone with them, if only to experience them without distraction. Sitting on one of the viewing benches in the room, I spied a young man doing something different than the other visitors. He was crouched before one of the paintings, carefully observing its every detail up close. I suspected at once that he might be a painter too and felt drawn to him with a magnetic pull. I approached him to confirm what I thought I knew of his vocation. Of course I was right.

“I’ve been thinking about Monet’s paintings in terms of his legacy,” I ventured, hoping for some insight from this kindred spirit, if stranger, “I’ve been wondering if his experience of Nature is the point, more than the objects themselves.”

“Well, painting is one thing, and Nature is another,” he replied, “And Monet knew the difference.”

We had a conversation, entirely facilitated by these beautiful objects, and this experience plus his remark made me revise my assumptions on the spot. Perhaps Monet’s legacy is not contained in the room with these individual paintings. Neither is it limited to the impressively large body of his work, writings and grand property, nor his position as a precursor to modern developments. Instead, Monet’s legacy is partly and importantly the confirmation of the relevance and importance of painting itself, as objects, meaning every uniquely identifying feature about them — their weight and size and materials, their wood and fabric and primer, their scumbled, buttery, brushy, dragged, scraped and built up surfaces, and most of all, their power to engage and create dialogue, even between strangers.

Talk about them all you want, but in the end you’ve got to see them — in person. 

waxed paper and filled with cookies.

I don’t have hens, so I don’t need my basket to collect eggs. As an artist, I love the shadows it throws when the sunlight hits it, and I love the contrast between the thin lines of the wire and the broad expanse of my table. I also appreciate, as I do with all vintage things, the passage of time inherent in its aged surface, its connection to other lives I can only imagine.

Here’s an old recipe I found for stuffed eggs. Farce is an old cooking term for the word, stuff.

To Farce Eggs
Take eight or ten eggs and boil them hard. Peel off the shells and cut every egg in the middle; then out the yolks. Make your farcing stuff as you do for flesh, saving only you must put butter into it instead of suet, and that a little. So done, fill your eggs where the yolks were, and then bring them and seethe them a little. And so serve them to the table.”
---The Good Housewife’s Jewel, Thomas Dawson, with an introduction by Maggie Black, London, 1596 (p. 86)

Shared interests create community; I was delighted when a fellow blogger spied my basket in the photographs from my last post, and wrote to me that she has the same one. You can find them online on sites like ebay. Here’s a link to a page with lots of different ones if you’d like one too.

see also: Vintage Canisters in the Modern Kitchen

a few little tips and tricks.

Make it by hand, gently. Overworking cake batter is the main reason why so many cakes are rubbery and heavy. Don’t let the butter get too soft. If it gets too soft and shiny, refrigerate it until it is pliable but not greasy.

When the cakes are still in the pans and warm, not cooled completely nor piping hot, wrap them completely in plastic wrap to let them steam. You can also do this by placing a pot lid on top and wrapping the cake pan in a towel if you’d rather not use plastic. When the cakes are cool, unwrap and frost them.

Here’s my favorite recipe:

Fudgey Chocolate Layer Cake

For the cake:
1 stick sweet unsalted butter, softened, not greasy
2 cups dark brown sugar, packed
3 eggs
2 t. vanilla extract
3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate, melted and cooled slightly (or alternatively 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate and if using unsweetened chocolate, add 1/4 cup more brown sugar to butter)
2 1/4 cups all-purpose unbleached flour
2 t. baking soda
1/2 t. salt
8 ounces sour cream
1 cup boiling water.

For the frosting
24 ounces (or two 12-ounce bags) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup heavy cream

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease two 9-inch cake pans. Line them with parchment paper and brush paper with butter again. Flour the pans and set aside.
2. In a large mixing bowl, beat butter and sugar with a wooden spoon until well blended. Add the eggs, one at a time, mixing well after each addition.
3. Add vanilla and then melted chocolate to the batter. Mix gently until combined.
4. Add baking soda and salt to flour and whisk together. Alternate dry ingredients with sour cream, beginning and ending with dries (adding 1/3 dries, then 1/2 sour cream, then 1/3 dries, then the rest of the sour cream, then the last third of the dries.) Combine gently until batter is smooth and all ingredients are incorporated. Lastly, add the boiling water slowly, 1/4 cup at a time, and mix gently between additions until it is all incorporated.
5. Divide batter between pans. Place pans on a sheetpan and place the sheetpan holding the pans on a rack positioned in the center of the oven. Bake for about 25 - 35 minutes, checking the layers half way through the baking time for doneness. When a toothpick inserted in the center of the cakes comes out almost clean, they are done. Do not over-bake. Cool on a wire rack for ten minutes or so until the pans are not burning hot anymore but still warm and wrap the pans in plastic wrap, or cover them each with a pot lid and wrap them in towels until they cool completely.
6. Make the frosting: Place the chocolate chips in a mixing bowl. Scald the cream, then add it to the chips. Whisk gently to combine, then beat to incorporate a little air and make a spreadable frosting. Place one cake layer on a serving platter and frost it. Place the second layer on top. Frost the outside and top of cake. Serve immediately. If you have leftover cake, refrigerate it or freeze it and always let it sit out at room temperature to soften it before serving.