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The regional table / Pennsylvania

Wet-Bottom Shoofly Pie

Published September 23, 2026 · Pennsylvania

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They are not really pies, they resemble cakes, but having a crust we will class them with pies — which is the most honest sentence ever written about this dish.

The document for this pie is a strange and lovely book: Mary at the Farm and Book of Recipes Compiled during Her Visit among the "Pennsylvania Germans", by Edith M. Thomas, printed in 1915, a novel with a cookbook inside it set in a Bucks County township. On page 377 the heading reads "PEBBLE DASH" OR SHOO-FLY PIE, and the recipe is attributed to the aunt the book is built around. Aunt Sarah made these to perfection and called them "Pebble Dash" pie. They are not really pies, they resemble cakes, but having a crust we will class them with pies. She lined three small sized pie-tins with rich pie crust. For the crumbs she placed in a bowl 3 cups of flour, 1 cup brown sugar and 3/4 cup of butter and lard, mixed and rubbed all together with the hands, not smooth, but in small rivels. For the liquid part she used 1 cup baking molasses, 1 cup hot water, 1 teaspoonful baking soda dissolved in a few drops of vinegar and stirred this into the molasses and water. She divided the liquid among the three pans, putting one-third in each crust, over which she sprinkled the crumbs. Bake one-half hour in a moderate oven. These have the appearance of molasses cakes when baked. That is a wet-bottom shoofly pie, described in full, eleven years before the public-domain line and three decades before the rest of the country had heard of the thing. Note what is in it and what is not: molasses, water, soda, flour, brown sugar, fat. No egg, no corn syrup, no spice. The recipe below is that one, scaled to a single nine-inch tin.

The name is a separate problem from the pie, and the newspaper archives take it apart. Shoofly was a national craze word long before it was a dessert: the Georgia papers of the early 1870s are full of shoofly cravats, a shoofly train on the Savannah line, Shoofly cotton gins advertised out of Bel-Air, shoofly wheelbarrows sold as children's toys at Christmas, and people dancing shoofly, all of it in the wake of the minstrel song everyone was singing. None of it has anything to do with molasses. The pie name arrives much later and arrives badly. The earliest true printing in the Georgia archive is a syndicated cookery column of 14 January 1938 in the Twiggs County New Era, and it reads in its entirety: Shoo-Fly Pie. Line a pie tin with pastry rolled a little thicker than usual. Sprinkle plentifully with brown sugar, dot with butter and bake in a hot oven (450 degrees Fahrenheit) 15 minutes. There is no molasses in it at all. The name had travelled and the recipe had not. Then comes 1946 and the whole country learns it from a record: in Nebraska's entire newspaper archive the phrase occurs exactly once, on 15 March 1946 in the Daily Nebraskan, reviewing Stan Kenton's Shoo Fly Pie, and in Georgia that spring every music-shop advertisement in the state carries Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy beside Sioux City Sue. On 30 May 1946 the Early County News printed a Mrs. Guy Collins of the Colomokee Club saying that the pie everyone is singing about is really something to eat, and gave the recipe she had taken out of the Atlanta Constitution. By September a filler item in the Athens Banner-Herald was explaining to readers that shoofly pie is a molasses crumb cake popular among the Pennsylvania Amish, and by 1 November 1956 the Soperton News could call it a regional dessert specialty from the Pennsylvania Dutch, really a pie-pudding with its sugar-crumb top layer. One dated claim should be treated with suspicion: the Cairo Messenger of 30 September 1949 printed that George Washington learned about sauerkraut, shoo-fly pie and scrapple at Valley Forge. Scrapple is defensible; the pie name is not attested anywhere within a century of that winter, and the sentence is folklore that a newspaper repeated. A last absence worth printing: The Pennsylvania German Cook Book of 1902, five hundred and sixty recipes, contains no shoofly pie and in fact no molasses pie of any kind — a molasses cake and nothing else.

Why this version works

Boiling water, not warm. The molasses has to be thinned enough to pour and to stay poured. Water at a full boil drops the viscosity far enough that the mixture levels itself in the shell and stays a liquid layer under the crumbs instead of climbing into them. Warm water leaves it thick, the crumbs sink through it, and you get one homogeneous cake with no wet bottom at all.

Crumbs rubbed to rivels, not to sand. Her word is rivels and her instruction is not smooth, but in small rivels. Irregular lumps of flour, sugar and fat are what make the top layer read as crumb rather than as streusel paste. Rub with the fingertips only until the largest pieces are the size of a pea and stop; overworked crumbs melt into a lid and seal the steam in.

The soda goes into the liquid, not the crumbs. Molasses is acidic; soda dissolved into it fizzes on contact and again in the oven, lifting the middle third of the filling into a light cake while the densest part stays at the base. The 1915 recipe slakes the soda in a few drops of vinegar first, which is not superstition — it guarantees it has dissolved before it meets the batter, so you get no bitter soda pockets and no yellow-green streaks.

The bottom is wet because the crust is cold and the filling is deep. A shell that goes into the oven cold, filled with a deep layer of sweet liquid, sets its base slowly. The sugar and molasses immediately above it never reach a cake temperature and stay sticky. That is the whole difference between wet-bottom and dry-bottom, and it is a matter of proportion and of oven, not of a different recipe.

Ingredient notes

Soda: A level teaspoon, dissolved in a few drops of vinegar before it goes into the molasses. More than that and the whole pie tastes soapy; less and the middle layer never lifts off the wet bottom, so the two run together.

Pastry: A single nine-inch shell, unbaked, rolled a little thicker than you would for a fruit pie, and chilled hard before filling. No blind baking — a pre-baked shell dries out under a wet filling and goes to grit. A rim built up half an inch above the tin gives you room for the full depth of liquid.

Molasses: The 1915 recipe says baking molasses, which is the unsulphured table-grade sort, dark but not blackstrap. Blackstrap will make the pie bitter and metallic — it is the residue left after the sugar has been taken out, and it behaves like a different ingredient. If the only option is a light table molasses, the pie will be sweeter and paler and perfectly good; it will not taste old.

Flour, sugar and fat for the crumbs: Plain flour, light brown sugar and a mixture of butter and lard, which is what the book specifies and is worth honouring: lard rubs into flour more coarsely than butter and holds the rivels apart. All butter works and gives a slightly denser, richer top. The proportions here are the 1915 ones scaled down, and they run deliberately short of fat by modern habit.

Step by step

  1. Line the tin and chill it. Roll the pastry a little thicker than usual, line a 9-inch pie tin, build the rim up proud of the edge and crimp it. Freeze the shell for 20 minutes while the oven heats to 375°F with a baking sheet on the middle shelf.
  2. Rub the crumbs. Put the flour and brown sugar in a wide bowl, add the cold butter and lard in small pieces, and rub with the fingertips until the mixture is in uneven crumbs the size of peas. Stop before it looks uniform; the largest pieces are the point.
  3. Mix the liquid. Stir the molasses and the boiling water together in a jug until smooth. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar in a spoon, watch it fizz, and stir it straight into the molasses.
  4. Fill and cover. Set the chilled shell on the hot baking sheet and pour in the liquid — it will look alarmingly thin and come most of the way up the rim. Scatter the crumbs evenly over the whole surface, right to the pastry edge, without stirring or pressing them.
  5. Bake hot, then moderate. Bake 15 minutes at 375°F, then drop the oven to 350°F and bake a further 25 to 30 minutes. It is done when the crumb top is dry and set and the pie has a wobble only in the middle two inches; a skewer into the upper half comes out with cake crumbs and into the base with syrup, which is correct.
  6. Cool completely before cutting. At least 3 hours on a rack, and it is better after a night. Cut warm, the bottom layer will run across the plate; cut cold, it holds a clean dark band under the cake.
If the crumbs sank and you have one uniform cake with no wet layer, the water was not hot enough or the pie sat too long before going into the oven — pour and bake within a couple of minutes, and use water off a full boil. If the bottom is so wet it is a syrup pool, the oven ran cool or the bake was cut short; return it for ten minutes at 350°F, tenting the top with foil so the crumbs do not darken further. A top that is pale and pasty rather than dry was rubbed too far: next time stop rubbing while it still looks ragged. And if the pie tastes soapy, it had too much soda or soda that never dissolved, which is exactly what the 1915 trick of slaking it in vinegar is there to prevent.

Storage and make-ahead

Keeps 4 days at room temperature under a dome and is at its best on day two, when the wet bottom has firmed slightly and the crumb has taken up a little moisture from beneath. Do not refrigerate it: the cold turns the molasses layer to a hard sheet and drives the crumb dry.

It freezes 2 months whole and well wrapped, though the bottom layer loses some of its gloss. Thaw at room temperature, never in a warm oven, which melts the base before the middle has thawed.

What to serve with it

Black coffee, and the old sources are unanimous about it — this is breakfast in its home territory as often as it is dessert, and a slice dunked in coffee is the traditional way to eat one. If it is dessert, unsweetened whipped cream is the only addition that does not make it cloying. Nothing else on the plate: there are two cups of sugar in it between the molasses and the crumbs.

From the recipe box / Pennsylvania

Wet-Bottom Shoofly Pie

Molasses, boiling water and soda poured into a pastry shell and buried under flour-and-brown-sugar crumbs, so the bottom stays dark and sticky while the top bakes to cake — the construction printed in a Pennsylvania German recipe book in 1915, under a different name.

Prep
30 min
Cook
45 min
Total
1 hr 15 min, plus 3 hr cooling
Serves
8
Calories
555 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. Line a 9-inch tin with the pastry, build the rim up proud of the edge, and freeze 20 minutes. Heat the oven to 375°F with a baking sheet inside.
  2. Rub the flour, brown sugar, salt, butter and lard together with the fingertips into uneven pea-sized crumbs and stop.
  3. Stir the molasses into the boiling water until smooth.
  4. Dissolve the soda in the vinegar and stir it into the molasses mixture.
  5. Set the chilled shell on the hot sheet, pour in the liquid, and scatter the crumbs evenly over the surface without pressing.
  6. Bake 15 minutes at 375°F, then 25–30 minutes at 350°F, until the top is dry and only the centre wobbles.
  7. Cool on a rack at least 3 hours, and preferably overnight, before cutting.

Nutrition

Fat23 g (14 g saturated)
Sodium360 mg
Protein5 g
Servingone eighth of a 9-inch pie
Calories555
Cholesterol60 mg
Carbohydrates83 g (52 g sugar, 2 g fiber)

Nutrition is an estimate calculated from the listed ingredients and is provided as a courtesy, not as dietary advice.

Questions readers ask

Is there an egg in it?

Not in the recipe this is built on. The 1915 version is molasses, hot water, soda, flour, brown sugar and fat, and nothing else — no egg and no spice. Plenty of twentieth-century versions add an egg to firm the bottom layer, and they work, but the pie sets perfectly well without one and the base stays glossier. If you want a bottom that slices more cleanly, beat one egg into the cooled molasses liquid and expect a slightly cakier band.

Can I use blackstrap molasses?

Better not. The old recipe calls for baking molasses, the dark but ordinary table grade. Blackstrap is what is left after most of the sugar has been extracted and it is bitter and sharply mineral; in a pie with a full cup of it and nothing to hide behind, it dominates everything. If blackstrap is all there is, use a third of it and make up the rest with light molasses or cane syrup.

Where does the name come from?

Nobody opened here can tell you, and several popular explanations do not survive contact with the archive. What the newspapers do show is that the word shoofly was national property in the early 1870s, decades before the dessert — Georgia papers of 1870 to 1882 carry shoofly cravats, a shoofly train, Shoofly cotton gins and shoofly wheelbarrows, all trailing the minstrel song of the day. The pie name itself first turns up in those archives in a syndicated column of 14 January 1938 attached to a recipe with no molasses in it, and goes national in 1946 on the back of a hit record. The molasses-draws-flies story is plausible and undocumented; it is repeated everywhere and printed here as folklore, not as fact.

What is the difference between wet-bottom and dry-bottom?

How much of the molasses stays liquid under the cake. In a wet-bottom pie, which is what the 1915 Bucks County recipe makes, the liquid is poured into the shell and the crumbs are scattered on top, so the densest molasses settles to the base and never bakes to cake. A dry-bottom is made by stirring part or all of the crumbs into the liquid, which distributes the sugar and bakes through to a uniform crumb cake with a pastry base. Both are real and both are old; what could not be found in any document opened for this article is the earliest printing of the terms themselves, so this piece describes the two constructions and does not date the vocabulary.