What Is Chess Pie —And How Did It Get Its Name? (2024)

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What Is Chess Pie —And How Did It Get Its Name? ›

Another version tells of a plantation cook who was asked what she was baking that smelled so great: “Jes' pie” (just pie) was her answer. Yet another myth states that the pie's high sugar content allowed it to keep well in a pie chest at room temperature, so “Chest Pie” turned into “Chess Pie.”

Another story that points to chess pie's English roots says that English cooks combined spoil-prone ingredients like butter and eggs with sugar to keep them from going bad and used that to create a pie that could be kept unrefrigerated in a chest. “Chest” became “chess,” and the rest is pie history.

Compared to other custard-based pastries, the chess pie holds up relatively well at room temperature. Often, it was stored in something called a "pie chest." The word "chest," some say, eventually became "chess." Southern gentlemen liked to enjoy the dessert after dinner while they played chess.

And so, supposedly, the name “Chess Pie” was coined. Chess pie and its many Southern variations — including vinegar pie, transparent pie and Tyler pie (a favorite of Edna Lewis's, putatively named for President John Tyler and perfected by the women of Miss Lewis's hometown of Freetown, Va.)

Classic chess pie pairs a traditional butter pie crust with a sweet, custardy filling made with sugar, butter, and eggs. Flour and cornmeal thicken the filling and vanilla enhances the creamy custard. And did we mention that the unlikely secret ingredient of this sweet and gooey pie is vinegar?

In Latin, the game was not named after the killing of the king, but after the attacks themselves—the checks. It was called ludis scaccorum (game of checks) or, when shortened, scacchi. The Latin word for check later gave us the Middle French eschec, which became échecs in the plural and chess in English.

One source of the word "pie" may be the magpie, a "bird known for collecting odds and ends in its nest"; the connection could be that Medieval pies also contained many different animal meats, including chickens, crows, pigeons and rabbits.

No one is entirely sure how chess pie got its name. Some say the pie used to be stored in an old-fashioned pie chest, or "chess" if you've got a Southern drawl.

However, chess pie is made with cornmeal to thicken the filling, whereas buttermilk pies generally only use all-purpose flour. In addition, chess pies are generally sweeter than buttermilk pies, which have a tangier taste.

Nomenclature. With the exception of the knight, each piece is abbreviated as the first letter of its name: K for king, Q for queen, R for rook, B for bishop, and P for pawn.

What does chess mean in baking? ›

2 also chess pie cake: A dense, sticky cake or bar cookie made with essentially the same ingredients as 1 above, with the addition of flour and leavening, and sometimes with a cream-cheese topping; hence nouns chess (cake) bar, chess cake square one of the serving pieces into which this cake is typically cut.

The pie rule applied to chess says that player 1 makes a move for white (divide) and player 2 selects the side they wish to play (choose). Player 1, knowing that player 2 will select the more advantageous side, must play a move that is neither too strong or too weak.

Pumpkin Pie Is The Must-Have Fall Dessert That Reigns Supreme.

Muhammad advocated against eating some healthy vegetables like peas, collard greens, turnip greens, sweet potatoes and white potatoes as a way to distance African Americans from what he considered “cheaply raised” slave foods, which is what probably led to the replacement of sweet potatoes with navy beans and the birth ...

Usually made of ceramic, pie birds are hollow and work releasing the steam from the pies, just like a chimney, so the filling does not bubble and damage the crust. It really protects the appearance of the crust and of the pie in general. Is a pie bird necessary? Well, no, it isn't.

Some suggest the dessert could be named after a pie chest or a town named Chester. But the most popular origin story for the name chess pie (and in turn chess squares) is that the dessert was made using easy-to-find ingredients around the house and called "jus' pie" which turned into chess pie.

échecs mpl. to play chess jouer aux échecs.