American · Dessert
Pecan Pie
A single-crust pie of pecans set in a thick corn-syrup custard. One serving is one slice from a 23cm pie.
CC BY 4.0. Cropped and colour-adjusted for this site.
Method
Rub the 90 g unsalted butter into the 150 g plain flour and 2 g fine sea salt until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs, over 6m. Add the 45 ml water and bring the dough together with a few strokes, without overworking it.
Flatten the dough into a disc, wrap it, and chill for 30m.
Roll the chilled dough out and line a pie tin with it, trimming and crimping the edge, over 8m. Prick the base and chill again briefly.
Line the pastry case with baking paper and fill with baking beans. Blind bake at 190 °C for 15m, then remove the paper and beans.
Baking the empty crust before the filling goes in sets the pastry enough that it does not turn soggy under a wet, sugar-heavy filling that spends a long time in the oven.
While the crust bakes, whisk the 3 eggs (150 g) with the 300 g light corn syrup, the 100 g light brown sugar, the 30 g unsalted butter, the 8 ml vanilla extract and the 2 g fine sea salt until smooth, over 6m.
Scatter the 200 g pecans over the base of the warm pastry case and pour the filling over them; the nuts will rise to the surface as it bakes. Bake at 160 °C for 45m, until the edges are set and the centre still shows a slight, even wobble.
Common pitfallA filling pulled from the oven too soon stays runny once cool, since it thickens mostly as it cools rather than while hot. It should still have a slight, even wobble across the centre, not a liquid one, when it comes out.
Leave the pie to cool completely for 2h before slicing, so the filling finishes setting.
Pecans are native to North America, and Indigenous peoples of the Mississippi and southern river valleys were harvesting and trading them long before pie was a category of food they had any reason to make. The earliest known written pecan pie recipes are later and more modest: food historians point to a pecan custard pie recipe printed in a Texas cookbook in the 1870s, and the earliest mention of "pecan pie" by that name in a national publication is usually dated to Harper's Bazaar in 1886 [2]. For its first decades it stayed a regional Southern dish rather than a national one.
The thick, sweet, almost custardy filling now considered standard has a specific and traceable source. In 1902 the Corn Products Refining Company began selling Karo, the first widely marketed corn syrup in the United States, and in the 1930s the company started printing a pecan pie recipe on the Karo label itself as a way of suggesting a use for the syrup [1]. The story that a corporate sales executive's wife devised the recipe is repeated often but is a company anecdote rather than a documented fact, and is best treated as folklore attached to a real marketing campaign rather than a settled origin.
What the Karo recipe undeniably did was standardise the pie nationally: by the 1940s, pecan pie had gone from a regional specialty to a fixture of mainstream American cookbooks such as The Joy of Cooking [1].
Sources
- The Extremely American History of Pecan Pie, SlateOn the pie's regional origins and its transformation by Karo's marketing recipe.
- The History of Pecan Pie, Tasting HistoryTraces early pecan pie and pecan custard recipes ahead of the corn-syrup era.