Shoofly Pie and the Farm Market
Near Intercourse, Pennsylvania
No visit to Amish Country is complete without a slice of shoofly pie, the sweet, sticky signature of Pennsylvania Dutch baking. It is a molasses pie, a gooey dark filling under a blanket of buttery crumbs, and it likely emerged among the Pennsylvania Dutch in the late eighteen hundreds, evolving from a molasses crumb cake. Traditionally it was not a fancy dessert at all, but a breakfast food, eaten with a hot cup of coffee.
The name is a favorite puzzle. Popular legend says cooks had to shoo the flies away from the sweet molasses, but food historians note there is little real evidence for that tale. A more likely source is a brand of table molasses called Shoo Fly that was popular in the late eighteen hundreds, itself said to be named for a boxing mule that toured with a circus.
Bakers here still argue over wet bottom versus dry bottom, the wet bottom leaving a gooey, custard like layer beneath the cake. You will find shoofly pie, along with whoopie pies, chow chow, apple butter, and homemade sausage, at the markets and farm stands that have always been the real engine of these crossroads, where Amish growers and English shoppers have traded for generations.
