The Mysterious Origins of Sugar Cream Pie

• Sugar Cream Pie's history is rather a mystery, shrouded in conjecture and full of red herrings. Most historical sources are anecdotal, mere blurbs accompanying sugar cream pie recipes in farm cookbooks. Once attributed to the Amish, some Indiana food historians now believe the Shakers invented sugar cream pie when they settled in Eastern Indiana in the early 1800s. Others claim Quaker settlers brought it with them from North Carolina. What's agreed is that the core ingredients, cream and sugar, have not changed in hundreds of years.

Assembling A Sugar Cream Pie

• Traditionally, you assemble a sugar cream pie by mixing wet and dry ingredients in a separate bowl, pouring them into a pie shell, and re-mixing the ingredients with your fingers halfway through the baking time. This prevents the separation of cream from the other ingredients; using your finger, as opposed to a spoon or fork, ensures you don't tear the still-cooking crust. Some contemporary recipes call for dotting the unfilled pie crust with butter just before adding the filling. Baking times and temperatures depend on the amount of wet ingredients used, but they range from 35 minutes to 1 hour, and 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, or just until the pie's center is set but still jiggly.

The Evolution of Sugar Cream Pie

• Sometimes called desperation pie, finger pie or Amish milk pie, sugar cream pie came to the attention of Hoosiers during the Depression. It was an easy pie to assemble, with only six ingredients. Struggling families, mostly farmers, often had staples like cream and sugar on hand. Spices, such as cinnamon and nutmeg, do not appear in traditional recipes, but lovers of sugar cream pie have since incorporated them into recipes. Some contemporary recipes entail prep that is more along the lines of making a basic custard, calling for milk, not cream, and adding cornstarch to augment the binding properties of the flour. They also direct the cook to boil the milk, sugar, flour, and cornstarch before using this heated roux to temper egg yolks.

How to Blind Bake a Pie Shell for Sugar Cream Pie

• To blind bake the sugar cream pie shell, preheat your oven to 400 F and line the shell with heavy-duty foil. Gently press the foil into the dough's fluted edges. Fill the foil-lined pie shell with uncooked rice, dried beans, pennies or small marbles. Bake the crust for about 15 minutes or until dry. Pull up a corner of the foil to check if the pie crust is dry; if the foil sticks to the crust in places, then return the pie crust to the oven. Check it again every 2 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and the objects you used as weights. Bake the crust an additional 5 to 10 minutes for partially or fully baked crusts.