The regional table / Indiana

Sugar Cream Pie

Published September 22, 2026 · Indiana

There are no eggs in it, which is the whole engineering problem and the whole reason it exists: this is what you bake when the hens have stopped laying.

The oldest Indiana version of this pie that could be read for this page is not called sugar cream pie. It is one of four recipes headed simply "Cream Pie" in the Indianapolis Cook Book of 1883, on Internet Archive, and it is contributed by Miss Jessie Wiley: "Beat thoroughly together with the white of one egg, one-half teacup sugar and tablespoonful of flour; then add one teacup of milk. Bake with pastry crust, and grate nutmeg on top." Sugar, flour, milk, one crust, nutmeg over the top and into the oven. That is the architecture of the modern pie almost exactly, with a single egg white doing work that flour does better, and it is sitting in an Indianapolis church-and-society cookbook forty-three years before anyone printed the name the state now uses.

The name is much younger than the pie. It appears in none of the three Indiana community cookbooks reachable here: not in the 1883 Indianapolis book, not in The Princeton Cook Book put out by the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, Indiana in 1909, whose pastry chapter runs to six recipes headed Cream Pie and puts eggs and a meringue on every one of them, and not in the Lutheran Hospital Ladies Aid cook book of Fort Wayne, 1927, which prints a Cream Pie with macaroons in it and a Sour Cream Pie with raisins and lattice strips and nothing resembling this. Georgia Historic Newspapers, which indexes syndicated food columns from all over the country, holds exactly four pages carrying the phrase sugar cream pie and the earliest of them is dated 25 March 2015. The pie is routinely credited to Indiana's Shaker and Quaker settlements, and that credit is a tradition rather than a document — nothing reachable here dates it or names anyone, and Indiana's own newspaper portal answered 403 to every request on 22 September 2026. It is likewise called the state pie, a title this page could not put a statute behind: the General Assembly's site at iga.in.gov hands a script an empty JavaScript shell and none of the text of the code. What is documented is the pie itself, in Indianapolis, in 1883, filed under a plainer name.

Why this version works

A fully baked shell. The filling is liquid when it goes in and stays liquid for the first fifteen minutes, so raw pastry under it turns to paste. Blind-bake the shell until it is properly coloured, not merely dry, and the bottom stays crisp under a wet filling for two days.

Flour instead of eggs. An egg custard sets because its proteins coagulate, and it curdles for the same reason if it goes ten degrees too far. A starch-set filling has no proteins to break: the flour swells, traps the cream, and holds at the boil. That is why this pie tolerates a hot oven and an imprecise cook, and why it was worth knowing in a farm kitchen in March.

Heavy cream, not milk. Fat is most of the flavour here, because nothing else in the pie has any — no eggs, no fruit, no chocolate. Cream also keeps the filling from tasting chalky, which is the failure mode of a flour-thickened milk pudding. The 1883 recipe says milk and one egg white; cream and no egg at all is the better trade.

Nutmeg grated over the top, not stirred in. Miss Jessie Wiley's instruction in 1883 is to grate it on top, and the reason shows up in the oven: the spice sitting on the surface toasts in the dry heat and scents the whole pie, while nutmeg stirred through the cream just makes it faintly grey and tastes of nothing in particular.

Ingredient notes

Cream: two cups of heavy cream, 36 per cent if your shop labels it. Half-and-half will set but tastes thin, and ultra-pasteurised cream is fine here because nothing is being whipped. This is not the place for a substitution: the pie is cream and sugar and there is nowhere for a weak ingredient to hide.

Flour: a third of a cup of plain flour, whisked dry into the sugar before any liquid touches it. Whisking it into the sugar first is what stops it lumping — the sugar crystals hold the grains apart. Cornstarch at a quarter cup works and gives a glossier, more jelly-like set; flour gives the softer, slightly opaque one this pie is supposed to have.

Sugar: one cup of granulated. Brown sugar makes a good pie and a different one, closer to butterscotch, and the top will not blister the same way. If you use it, drop the vanilla.

Pastry: a single nine-inch shell, blind-baked and cooled. Any all-butter recipe you already trust. The pie is rich enough that a sweet pastry tips it over; keep the shell plain and salted.

Step by step

Blind-bake the shell. Line a 9-inch pie plate with pastry, chill it 30 minutes, then bake at 400°F with parchment and weights for 20 minutes, remove the weights and bake 10 to 12 minutes more, until the base is dry and the rim is properly gold. Cool it. Drop the oven to 375°F.
Whisk the dry together. In a bowl, whisk the sugar, flour and salt until there is no streak of white flour left anywhere in it. Do this properly and the filling will not lump; skip it and it will.
Add the cream. Pour in the cream in three goes, whisking smooth after each. Whisk in the vanilla. The mixture will look thin and slightly gritty, which is correct — the flour has not swollen yet.
Fill and finish the top. Set the cooled shell on a baking sheet, pour in the filling, dot the surface with the butter in small pieces and grate the nutmeg generously over the whole top.

Fill the cooled, blind-baked shell, then dot with butter and grate nutmeg over the surface. AI-generated illustration.
Bake. Bake 45 to 55 minutes at 375°F. It is done when the outer two inches are set and the middle three inches still move as one soft mass when you nudge the sheet, and when the top has browned in blisters and patches rather than evenly.
Cool it all the way. Cool on a rack at room temperature for at least 4 hours before cutting. The set finishes as it cools and a warm slice will run across the plate.

If the filling stayed soupy under a browned top, it came out early — put it back at 375°F for another 10 minutes and judge by the wobble rather than the clock. If it went lumpy, the flour met the cream before it met the sugar; strain the filling through a sieve into the shell and it will bake out fine. If the top browned to dark before the middle set, cover it loosely with foil for the rest of the bake, and next time move the pie down a shelf.

Storage and make-ahead

Keeps 3 days loosely covered in the fridge, and the crust stays surprisingly crisp because the filling sets rather than weeps. Take the slices out half an hour before eating; cold flattens the cream.

It does not freeze. A flour-set cream filling separates on thawing into a grainy layer and a puddle, and there is no getting it back.

What to serve with it

Coffee, black and strong, and nothing else on the plate. This is a sweet pie with no acid in it at all, so anything you add should be bitter rather than fruity.

If you want fruit with it, put it beside rather than on: a few raw tart apple slices, or sour cherries with no sugar.

From the recipe box / Indiana

Sugar Cream Pie

Cream, sugar and a spoonful of flour stirred together, poured into a baked shell, dusted with nutmeg and baked until it barely holds — a pie made entirely of things that keep on a shelf in February.

Prep: 20 min
Cook: 50 min
Total: 1 hr 10 min, plus blind-baking and 4 hours cooling
Serves: 8
Calories: 470 per serving

Ingredients

Scale

1 shell 9-inch pastry, blind-baked and cooled
1 cup granulated sugar
0.33 cup all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon fine salt
2 cups heavy cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, in small pieces
½ teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated over the top

Instructions

Blind-bake a 9-inch shell at 400°F until the base is dry and the rim gold, and cool it. Set the oven to 375°F.
Whisk the sugar, flour and salt together until completely combined.
Whisk in the cream in three additions until smooth, then the vanilla.
Pour into the cooled shell on a baking sheet, dot with the butter and grate the nutmeg over the top.
Bake 45–55 minutes, until the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as one mass.
Cool on a rack at least 4 hours before cutting.

Nutrition

Fat	32 g (19 g saturated)
Sodium	225 mg
Protein	4 g
Serving	1 slice, one-eighth of a 9-inch pie
Calories	470
Cholesterol	60 mg
Carbohydrates	41 g (26 g sugar, 1 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 really no egg in it?

None, and that is the point of the pie rather than an omission. The filling is set by flour, which is why it survives a hot oven without curdling and why a farm kitchen could make it in late winter when there were no eggs to spare. The 1883 Indianapolis recipe hedges with a single egg white; leave it out and the pie is better.

Can I cook the filling on the stove first?

You can, and many Indiana cooks do: bring the cream to a simmer, whisk in the sugar and flour, cook until thick, pour into the baked shell and brown the top under the broiler. It is faster and more reliable and it gives a smoother, denser pie. What it loses is the blistered, freckled top that comes from baking the raw filling, which is most of how the thing is recognised.

What is the pie supposed to look like when it is done?

Browned in patches rather than evenly, slightly sunken at the edges, and still moving in the middle when you nudge the tray. A pie that is firm all the way across when hot will be stiff and rubbery when cold. Trust the wobble and the four hours.

Why is it called sugar cream pie if the old books call it cream pie?

Because the name came later than the recipe. Search the Indiana community cookbooks that are readable — Indianapolis 1883, Princeton 1909, Fort Wayne 1927 — and the phrase is in none of them; every one of them files this family of pies under plain Cream Pie. The compound name spread with the dish's fame, not with its invention.