Cracker Pie

Name: Cracker Pie
Ingredients: 0.5 teaspoonful ground cloves; 0.5 teaspoonful ground cinnamon; 1 tablespoonful butter

Source: Abby Fisher, 1881

History

Cracker Pie is recipe no. 58 in "What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking" (San Francisco, 1881), the cookbook of Abby Fisher. Fisher directs that it be "made the same as bread pie, except flavor with one-half teaspoonful of ground cloves, one-half teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, and one tablespoonful of butter". It builds directly on the recipe just before it, her Light Bread Pie (no. 57), a custard-style pie in which grated stale bread is bound with sweet milk, the juice and grated peel of an orange, and beaten egg yolks, then meringued with the whites. The cracker version substitutes crackers for the grated bread and leans on warm spice and butter — an economical pie made from pantry staples.

The historical record does not document a specific earlier origin for this particular dish. It survives as Fisher set it down: a thrift pie among her chapter of pies, drawn, as she wrote, from "an experience of upwards of thirty-five years" in Southern cooking.

Abby Fisher was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in June 1831 to Abbie Clifton, and later earned her living in San Francisco as a pickle and preserve manufacturer. Genealogical research in San Francisco records identifies her father as James J. Andrews, an Orangeburg planter who held some seventy people in slavery, and an 1869 receipt from the Freedman's Savings and Trust in Mobile records her under her mother's name. Before 1865, censuses recorded only an enslaver's name with the age and sex of those he held, so no surviving record names Fisher herself; Karen Hess, who rediscovered her book, noted that absence of documentation. Because she could neither read nor write, she dictated her recipes for others to transcribe. Her book was awarded two medals at the San Francisco Mechanics' Institute Fair in 1880 and a diploma at the Sacramento State Fair in 1879, and it is the second known cookbook by a Black woman in the United States, after Malinda Russell's Domestic Cook Book (1866).

Ingredients

0.5 teaspoonful ground cloves
0.5 teaspoonful ground cinnamon
1 tablespoonful butter

Instructions

Prepare the cracker pie using the same method as bread pie.
Flavor with one-half teaspoonful of ground cloves, one-half teaspoonful of ground cinnamon, and one tablespoonful of butter.