The History of Vinegar Pie

Vinegar pie is a tangy dessert with roots in that stretch from the deep South through the upper Midwest of the United States. Made with sugar, flour, vinegar, and occasionally butter and/or an egg, it is far older than most people think. While vinegar pie is often thought to have popped up during the Great Depression as one of the era’s famous make-do “desperation pies,” it actually predates the 1930s by just a few decades shy of a century! One of the earliest printed recipes for vinegar pie comes from Marion Scott’s Practical Housekeeper, which was published way back in 1855. Double crusts or lattice tops were common in these early recipes, including one that appeared in an 1859 edition of The Lancaster Intelligencer. Another recipe printed in an 1869 issue of Arthur’s Home Magazine called for an entire half-cup of vinegar, but balanced it with more butter and an egg. Around the end of the 19th century, thickeners other than flour started to show up in vinegar pie recipes, including cornstarch and crushed crackers. While the earliest recipes were relatively spartan and most relied on large amounts of vinegar to give the pie plenty of tart flavor, over time, the recipes began to include greater amounts of eggs and sugar, and by the 1920s, vinegar pie had become (relatively) light and notably sweet and was often seen as a special treat. Laura Ingalls Wilder even mentioned her mother making vinegar pie for Christmas in her 1932 book, Little House in the Big Woods, and the pie was also mentioned in the 1890 diary writings of Nannie Stillwell Jackson, who documented life of her small Arkansas farm. While it is unclear exactly how the dish spread from one region to another, it’s thought that vinegar pie may have originated in the Middle Atlantic-Midwest corridor (think Ohio and Pennsylvania) and then spread outwards into the South and the upper Midwest. Although it has long been popular across a wide swath of the U.S., vinegar pie has never gained national notoriety, and the recipe itself often varies slightly by family tradition and region. Today, vinegar pie is still baked in many areas of the country, and although most modern recipes use apple cider vinegar for its more complex flavor, some bakers still use white vinegar to make the classic dessert.