“There is a whole galaxy of pie fillings based on brown sugar, molasses, and corn syrup or maple syrup,” the authors write. “These pies seem born of scarcity and frugality. In fact, they are closely related to so-called ‘desperation pie,’ which is made with eggs, sugar, vinegar, and not much else.” (Transparent pie—also sometimes called transparent pudding—was certainly a thing in the 19th and early 20th centuries in New England and Pennsylvania Dutch country, and across the South, though it lacks vinegar and more closely resembles chess pie.)
But vinegar pie is not strictly a product of desperation. In fact, one of the earliest printed recipes appears in Marion Scott’s Practical Housekeeper from 1855—nearly 75 years before the fateful stock market crash of 1929 kicked off the Great Depression. And it wasn’t included for lack of citrus, as Scott’s book also contains two lemon and two orange pie recipes, along with a bevy of other fruits and fillings.
Scott’s vinegar pie recipe is comparatively more detailed than many others in her book, offering precise quantities rather than the general guidance she provides for fruit pies: “One cup of brown sugar, half a cup of water, two tablespoonsful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of essence of lemon, a tablespoonful of flour,” she writes, noting that this pie is baked with a double crust.
A double crust, or even a lattice top, was not uncommon in vinegar pie recipes at the time. Another of the earliest printed recipes for vinegar pie comes from an 1859 edition of The Lancaster Intelligencer. It calls for “a gill of cider or vinegar” (about half a cup), as well as molasses or sugar, and “half a dozen spoonfuls of flour.” Like Scott’s recipe, it calls on the baker to use a double crust, “or put the top crust on in strips if it is liked better.”
To be sure, those early pies were fairly spartan affairs—even though the Hand Book of Practical Receipts from 1860 reassures readers that its version of vinegar pie, with a fatless filling that’s quite similar to Scott’s, “is delicious.”
“Later, it lightened up some,” says McDermott. “Then people were putting in eggs, and people were putting in more sugar. I think by the 1920s it was actually quite a sweet pie—much sweeter than [the Lancaster Intelligencer recipe] of the mid-19th century.”
While Scott’s recipe merely contains a hint of vinegar, a recipe from an 1869 issue of Arthur’s Home Magazine bumps up the tartness, with a half cup of vinegar per cup of sugar and no water—but it includes butter and egg to offset some of the bracing acidity. Toward the end of the 19th century, cooks also began to experiment with other thickeners than flour. The Royal Baking Powder Co.’s My Favorite Receipt from 1886 contains one recipe for transparent pie but a full six variations on vinegar pie, both single- and double-crusted, with various thickeners including flour, cornstarch, and crushed crackers.
