Chess pie: how to make the flakiest pastry

Chess pie was, in one sense, new to me when I started learning about it a few months ago. I’d never heard of this favourite of the American South until I came across it in a pie-centric cookery book. But in another sense, it’s extremely familiar – both to me and to anyone who’s ever eaten a pie or a tart before. Chess pie is a bit like an ur-pie, made with the most simple, most essential of pie ingredients.

That’s possibly where its name comes from: the story goes that in the 1800s in Alabama, where nuts and other common pie fillings were expensive, a freed slave made a pie with the most basic of ingredients – eggs, sugar, butter, cream. When asked about it, she replied: ‘Oh it’s jes’ pie.’ And, lo, thanks to a mishearing, chess pie was born.

Of course, there are other theories. One is that chess pie is actually much older than that, and comes from England. There are records of simple custard tarts, cooked to delay the spoilage that would occur if the ingredients were left raw, meaning that the pie could be left unrefrigerated in a ‘chest’. American writer and chef Lisa Donovan found a suggestion that the pie was originally made not with cornmeal, but with chestnut flour – hence ‘chess’ – and that this only changed when the American chestnut tree fell victim to blight. The resulting pie was fantastic, but she remained unconvinced by this neat solution.

I suspect there is an element of truth to both of the principal origin stories: that a basic tart that could be left unrefrigerated was often made in England, but that chess pie as we know it originated in the American South as one of a host of make-do-and-mend pies during the Great Depression.