Canada’s Forgotten Dessert: The History of Flapper Pie (2024)

By Gabby Peyton

How does a dessert become forgotten? Well, perhaps the recipe isn’t written down, excluded from a community cookbook for one reason or another, perhaps the ingredients go out of fashion, replaced with more expensive and exotic components, or perhaps it just fades away.

Flapper Pie is a prairie favourite, despite recently garnering the term “forgotten” by food media across Canada. This simple creamy pie grew in popularity throughout the 1920s and 1930s and has remained in the hearts of families in Alberta, Saskatchewan and beyond.

No wings found in this pie

Flapper Pie is a sweet cream pie made with basic pantry staples. A graham crust is amped up with the addition of ground cinnamon and serves as the base for a vanilla custard filling thickened with cornstarch which is then topped with a fluffy layer of browned meringue. There are a few origin stories behind the name, which more than likely earned the name Flapper Pie because its rise in popularity occurred in the 1920s when Flapper Girls and their short dresses and haircuts were all the rage — at this point in Canadian history, Flapper Pie was served in every cafe across the prairie provinces.

The History of Flapper Pie

Cream pies in general have a longer history, dating well before the Flappers were flippantly strutting down the street in their short skirts. Mock Cream Pie for example, made with very similar ingredients to Flapper Pie, was very popular in the 1910s across North America, and we all know that favourites like Lemon Meringue Pie have been around for ages. The first recorded recipe for the Lemon Meringue appeared in the United States in 1847, while the Coconut Cream Pie harkens to the early 19th century, with recordings of the creamy delight appearing in the 1820s cookbooks throughout the Southern United States.

Flapper Pie started to make appearances, albeit briefly, in graham cracker ads in newspapers like the Edmonton Journal in the 1920s when recipes were presented by manufacturers to convince housewives their graham crackers were the best. It continued to be popular in the 1930s because of the simple and inexpensive ingredients required — even Depression-era kitchens could pump out a delicious Flapper Pie. Post-World War II, however, the poor Flapper Pie began its descent into the forgotten, relegated to family lore and recipes passed on by word of mouth.

Pie Remembered

While many Flapper Pie recipes lay dormant for generations, forgotten as a Depression-era pie, some families continue to have a soft spot for it. Even today as I researched for this article, it was hard to find a recipe for Flapper Pie online; only a few prairie food bloggers offered up a blog on the forgotten pie. Jean Pare’s Company’s Coming Pies cookbook from the early 2000s has one, but many people who know and love the pie don’t even have a recipe for it.

It was perhaps Karlynn Johnston’s 2016 cookbook entitled Flapper Pie and A Blue Prairie Sky: A Modern Baker’s Guide to Old-Fashioned Desserts: A Baking Book that brought this forgotten dessert back into the Canadian culinary limelight, though those who know and love Flapper Pie could never forget its creamy goodness. For a slice piled high with meringue, those in the know will head to the Blackfoot Truckstop Diner in Calgary, a 24-hour joint that’s been serving slices for decades.

Hungry for more? Check out these Classic Canadian Dishes:

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• The History of the Iconic Jiggs Dinner
• The History of Pea Soup in Canada
• The History of Baked Beans in Canada
• Meat Pie Magic: The History of Tourtière
• Classic Canadian Dishes: Pouding Chômeur
• Classic Canadian Dishes: The Lobster Roll
• Classic Canadian Dishes: Saskatoon Pie
• Classic Canadian Dishes: Cod au Gratin
• Dessert in a Bag: The History of Figgy Duff