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Sweet Baked Goods Vinegar Pie

vinegar pie
512px-Chess_pie.jpg
(from The Practical Housekeeper and Young Woman's Friend by Marion L. Scott, 1855)

Ingredients:
1 cup brown sugar​
1/2 cup of water​
2 tbsp. vinegar​
1 tsp. essence of lemon​
1 tbsp. of flour​
2 pie crusts​
Instructions:
One cup of brown sugar, half a cup of water, two tablespoonsful of vinegar, one teaspoonful of essence of lemon, a tablespoonful of flour. Bake between two crusts, moderately half an hour.​


vinegar pie
(from Hand Book of Practical Receipts, Or, Useful Hints in Every Day Life, published by A.S. Barnes & Burr, 1860)

Ingredients:
3 tbsp. vinegar​
4 tbsp. sugar​
2 tbsp. water​
a rich pie paste for baking​
Instructions:
Three table spoons of vinegar (if good), four do. sugar, two do. of water; bake in rich paste; it is delicious.​
(* CWT Note: The abbreviation do. in this recipe means "ditto", as in repeat the previous measurement unit. In this recipe, the author is avoiding repeating tablespoons again and again!)​


Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel just had show on early Kentucky Food. One of the featured recipes was Vinegar Pie. This pie dates back to early pioneers and was very popular in the 1800s. It came into existence as a dessert for families who had only the basic ingredients.

Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions vinegar pie in her book "Little House In the Woods. She writes about eating it at Christmastime.

Photo by Eunice [CC BY-SA 2.0]
 
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I guess that depends ... :D
For me, the more I tasted the sauce and not the fish, the better ...
I have to admit, to the way I like fish best, redfish with a nice breaded crust, prepared like a Schnitzel, a heavier sauce doesn't do any damage. I'm aware that true fish lovers will shiver, but the "Banausen" (= ignorants) like me sure welcome everything that make a fish taste less like fish ...
The best piece of fish I ever had was at Emeril's at Universal in Orlando and it was a pecan encrusted redfish that was beyond description.for an appetizer we had Lobster Cheesecake.
 
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I guess that depends ... :D
For me, the more I tasted the sauce and not the fish, the better ...
I have to admit, to the way I like fish best, redfish with a nice breaded crust, prepared like a Schnitzel, a heavier sauce doesn't do any damage. I'm aware that true fish lovers will shiver, but the "Banausen" (= ignorants) like me sure welcome everything that make a fish taste less like fish ...

LOL! I'm not a huge fish lover myself, but everyone else in my sphere is, so I hear all these 'tips' like don't drown it in sauce or cream. Personally, I only eat fish deep fried, hides much of the fishiness :tongue:
 
I was searching for an old recipe for vinegar pie and there are not many out there.on the vintage recipe website all I could find was one and it is from 1919.it is in :
The International Jewish Cookbook....1600 recipes
Author:Florence Keiser Greenbaum,Instructor in Cooking and Domestic Science
She was a graduate of Hunter College in N.Y.C.
Rich crust
1cup of vinegar
2 cups of water
2cups of sugar
Lump of butter
Cornstarch
Lemon essence
Line a pie plate with a rich crust and fill with the following mixture:vinegar,water and sugar,boil.add butter and enough cornstarch to thicken,flavor with lemon essence and put in a pie a pie she'll and bake.

#### I found this recipe a bit strange as to using so much vinegar ,even with 2 cups of sugar.
 
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I was searching for an old recipe for vinegar pie and there are not many out there.on the vintage recipe website all I could find was one and it is from 1919.it is in :
The International Jewish Cookbook....1600 recipes
Author:Florence Keiser Greenbaum,Instructor in Cooking and Domestic Science
She was a graduate of Hunter College in N.Y.C.
Rich crust
1cup of vinegar
2 cups of water
2cups of sugar
Lump of butter
Cornstarch
Lemon essence
Line a pie plate with a rich crust and fill with the following mixture:vinegar,water and sugar,boil.add butter and enough cornstarch to thicken,flavor with lemon essence and put in a pie a pie she'll and bake.

#### I found this recipe a bit strange as to using so much vinegar ,eek with 2 cups of sugar.

Yeah, that's a bit heavy-handed on the vinegar for sure, especially with that much sugar...was she channeling a pickle recipe? You know one of those sweet but tart pickles you get - is it bread and butter pickles?
 
I found another Vinegar Pie Recipe. It is in cookbook from Ascension Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. This church was organized in 1836.

Vinegar Pie

1 stick butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 teaspoons vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup broken pecans
1 8inch pie shell, unbaked

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time. Add vinegar, vanilla and pecans. Beat well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake 30 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees.
 
Another type of transparent pie.


I remember a few discussions on ' vinegar, iew! ', then discovering how terrific some recipes were. I have a terrible time with ' food ', as a topic because it's not absorbing to me. Love some baking, enjoy some cooking, but maybe because ' eating ' isn't an interesting thing to me, rarely become smitten with recipes- but this was.

Amazing what they did with ingredients at hand- that's what's always so interesting to me. Vinegar! Who knew?
 
Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions vinegar pie in her book "Little House In the Woods. She writes about eating it at Christmastime.

Thought I'd share some notes from The Little House Cookbook:

Sometimes called "poor man's pie," [Vinegar Pie] took the place of lemon pie in areas where lemons were as precious as gold. We think it would have been made this way in both Malone and Wisconsin, using both eggs and butter, but frequently the pie was made without even these simple luxuries.

Today we prebake pie shells or thicken juices to preserve soggy piecrust. Frontier cooks, as a rule, expected the bottom crust to absorb juices and greased the pie pan to prevent the wet crust from sticking.

The recipe they offer is very close to this one:

http://www.recipetips.com/recipe-cards/t--67864/vinegar-pie.asp

I made a mustard sauce yesterday (hard boiled eggs with mustard sauce and potatoes on the side is a common dish in Germany. You will not find it in restaurants, but at home it is a favourite with many).

The recipe you linked to looks so good! We'll have to try it this week. :smile:
 
I was fortunate to be able to try a vinegar pie will camping at Hartwick Pines State Park near Grayling MI. They were having a re-enactment of an early logging camp at the park with people dressed in period clothing and acting out their various roles.
The pie was delicious and the vinegar was not at all over powering in its taste. It had a sweet but tangy appeal to it. much like key lime pie. It was said that it was one of the main staples of the loggers who needed a huge calorie intake in the course of a days work. The camp cook was usually the second highest paid employee of the camp.
 
The average logger needed 4,000 calories a day. I got this from Yankee Magazine, published here in NH, years ago. Maine and NH had very large numbers of logging camps. I have a great cookie recipe to share from my Yankee cookbook.
 
Oops, thought I'd replied to this thread long time back. Thank you for the welcome! It does seem to be a friendly place.

JoeWheeler and NH Civil War Gal, thanks for the logging comments. Hadn't run across the logger needing 4000 calories a day thing, although I'd assumed they ate pretty generously. It's interesting how logging practices varied from place to place and time to time. Sometimes the frontier would have considerably newer technology than more established places, because (for instance) the older sawmills had reciprocal saws and upgrading to the circular saw would cost more than it would save, while the newer ones were built for the circular saw (or, later, for the bandsaw rather than the circular). I hadn't realized until recently how heavily Vermont (and New Hampshire?) was logged at one time; clearcutting there provided some of the earliest evidence that this was not a wise practice, because of the resulting erosion, for those few who were paying attention.

Just finished a 1970s romance set in Civil War era Seattle/the West coast that has a couple of long passages on a logging camp. Thought the descriptions were pretty good as a rule, but one of them completely bewildered me -- can't remember the term at the moment, but when I looked it up, she was talking about what people in Michigan and Indiana called a "corduroy road." But from her description, the gaps between the logs were far too large to be functional. I think she'd mixed up the support structure with the road itself, and I have a suspicion she'd never seen one. The difference in resources available to authors now compared to then are just extraordinary.
 
This isn’t common? My Deep South Mississippian family would make this as a treat back in the 30’s. Wish I still had the recipe.
 
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Thought bump this thread on Vinegar Pie. It is one well worth trying.
My Kentucky grandmother made this pie all the time! Really it is delicious. If you have pecans you can sprinkle a few on the top before you bake it, and if you don't- it's still good. I loved watching grandmother cook. She never used measuring cups or spoons. Her recipes were X handfuls of flour, X lumps of butter or lard ( the size of an egg or a walnut) --- salt, baking soda, etc she measured in the palm of her hand. Liquids were added a bit at a time until it looked right. Sugar was added until it was sweet enough. Needless to say, we don't have a written recipe for any of her dishes 😢
 
I found another Vinegar Pie Recipe. It is in cookbook from Ascension Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. This church was organized in 1836.

Vinegar Pie

1 stick butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3 teaspoons vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup broken pecans
1 8inch pie shell, unbaked

Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time. Add vinegar, vanilla and pecans. Beat well. Pour into unbaked pie shell. Bake 30 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees.
This one sounds like the closest match to the one grandmother made. So good!
 
Today Jan. 23 is National Pie Day. Thought bump this thread with a simple pie which is delicious. This one my Granny made. Enjoy!
I love this place! I was a trained cook and worked for many years and just today I learned about "lemon essence". We always either had fresh lemons or lemon juice on hand, so I never knew there was a concentrated extract like vanilla or almond, which makes complete sense for back then (and in larger commercial kitchen's even today I would assume).
Apparently a very little goes a long, long way as a flavoring.

The vinegar (often homemade) would have replaced the tang and some of the liquid of real lemons. I'm fairly certain from reading old recipes that the homegrown varieties of vinegars used were probably not as high in acidity as the typical 5% sold today. Here's a good page on diy vinegar: How To Make Apple Cider Vinegar
 
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