The Origin of Pecan Pie Was a Custard, Long Before Karo

The origin of pecan pie, as far as paper can prove it, is February 6, 1886, in New York, where Harper's Bazar printed a short item headed "Pecan Pie." It described a milk custard with boiled pecans in it. The first known cook to put her name to one was a Texan, writing to a Dallas newspaper in 1898. The corn syrup version came a generation later.

What is the origin of pecan pie, according to the paper trail?

The 1886 item ran on page 95 of Harper's Bazar. The same words appeared on page 3 of Texas Siftings, a weekly humor magazine, in an issue with the same date. It opens like this:

Is not only delicious, but is capable of being made "a real state pie," as an enthusiastic admirer said.

The instructions are brief. Hull the pecans carefully, throw them into boiling milk, make a rich custard, strain the nuts out of the milk and add them to the custard in a pastry-lined plate. A meringue "may be added, if liked, but very careful baking is necessary."

Sources disagree about which magazine had it first. The food historian David Shields credits Texas Siftings, which he calls "the Austin paper," and concludes that pecan pie "began in Texas" in the 1880s. He says his digging confirmed what Andrew F. Smith argued in a 2012 talk in Charleston, "The Pecan: A Culinary History."

The etymologist Barry Popik, who posted both printings to the American Dialect Society mailing list in July 2006, lists Harper's first and marks Texas Siftings as the reprint. Lynne Olver's Food Timeline also cites Harper's. One detail undercuts "the Austin paper": Texas Siftings was founded in Austin in 1881, but it had moved to New York early in 1884. By 1886, both printings came out of the same city.

The item never says which state the "state pie" belongs to, and no author is named in the transcriptions. What can be said is that the oldest known pecan pie recipe ran in two New York weeklies on the same day, one of them carrying Texas in its name, and that the next fifteen years of printed recipes point at Texas.

Who invented pecan pie?

Nobody knows, though one woman did claim it. On January 23, 1898, the Dallas Morning News printed a letter on page 6 from Mrs. Matt Bradley of Grayson County, Texas, under the heading "Texas Pecan Pie." She had decided to call her recipe "The Texas Pecan Pie," and since she had never seen it in any paper or cookbook, she felt "justified in claiming to be its originator and the right to christen it."

Her pie was sugar, sweet milk, finely chopped pecans, eggs and a spoonful of flour. It was finished with browned egg whites and a few more nuts on top. That July the Ladies' Home Journal printed the same recipe on page 32, sent in by a "Mrs. M. B." The initials fit.

The recipe kept traveling. The Goshen Daily Democrat in Indiana reprinted the Journal's version on November 26, 1898, two days after Thanksgiving, which was too late to help anybody.

Bradley has a fair claim to the name. When Popik checked in 2006, the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation for "pecan pie" was a "Texas Pecan Pie" on page 49 of T. P. Marshall's Lone Star Cook Book of 1901, with her proportions exactly. Her claim to the pie itself is weaker, because Harper's had printed one twelve years earlier.

What did the first pecan pies taste like?

Nothing like the one on the table now. They were custard pies. Shields compares the method to early Kentucky hickory nut pies, where ground nuts went into "your favorite custard pie" and floated up to form a brown top. Old Southern custards, he notes, were eggier and creamier than later fillings, with half as much sugar.

Custard held on for decades. The Christian Science Monitor printed a "Texas Pecan Pie" with a cup of sweet milk and a meringue on March 24, 1914. In 1922 Myrtle Mainer Neff, wife of Texas governor Pat M. Neff, published one built on milk, sugar, egg yolks and cornstarch, served with whipped cream. In the late 1920s the San Saba Pecan Company, in west-central Texas, was handing out the recipe for "Mrs. Bell's famous pecan pie." It was a cream pie too.

The filling started to turn syrupy soon after 1900. Shields points to a recipe from Mrs. H. E. Knight of Fort Worth in the Star-Telegram of July 2, 1908. It begins by boiling two cups of sugar and two of water until thick, with "a lump of butter the size of an egg." That is syrup made on the stove, not poured from a tin, and it depends on sugar having become cheap.

Why so late for a nut native to North America? Rebecca Sharpless, a historian at Texas Christian University, writes that pecans were "shockingly rare" in nineteenth-century cooking. The trees were hard to domesticate, and recipes followed only once growers worked out how to make them pay. The first successful pecan grafts are usually credited to an enslaved man named Antoine at Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana, in 1846 or 1847. Commercial orchards took decades more.

Is pecan pie from New Orleans?

Not in the way the popular story says. That story has French settlers meeting the pecan in colonial Louisiana and promptly baking it into a tart. Shields calls it "The Louisiana Lie." Nineteenth-century Louisiana records are full of pralines and pecan cake, he writes, and have no pecan tart. French-trained cooks of the era also tended to recoil from American pies, custard pies most of all.

John Egerton, in Southern Food (1987), looked at the related claim that Louisianans ate pecan candies before 1800. He found "no recipes or other bits of evidence to prove it."

Louisiana does have a later and better claim, to the syrup pie. Sharpless found it in A Book of Famous Old New Orleans Recipes Used in the South for More than 200 Years, a slender book by anonymous compilers that she dates to 1900. Page 47 has a pecan pie made with "Louisiana syrup," meaning cane syrup.

The editor added a note: "The little lumber town out of Orleans, seems to be the original home of pecan pie." The town is Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain. The same note says "many New Orleanians drive out to buy them during the season," which reads more like the motoring age than 1900, so the date deserves a question mark. Sharpless says she has found little else on the Slidell pie.

So the earliest pecan pie of any kind is the 1886 custard. The earliest syrup-filled one Sharpless located comes from a sawmill town near New Orleans, around 1900 or later. Neither is anywhere near the French colonial era, a pattern that turns up across Southern cooking's documented record.

Did Karo syrup invent pecan pie?

No, though the company said so for years. The Corn Products Refining Company of New York and Chicago introduced Karo light and dark corn syrups on May 13, 1902. The brand's own history says the name is "believed" to honor the chemist's wife, Caroline.

An archived 2013 version of Karo's own history page credited the pie to another wife, that of a corporate sales executive, who found "a new use for corn syrup" in the 1930s. The current page has dropped her and says only: "Down South, a new use for corn syrup is born."

Sharpless repeated a version of the story in her book Grain and Fire, writing that the pie was invented by the wife of a Karo employee, "likely in Chicago." In November 2022 she took it back on the UNC Press blog: "I bit on a corporate line from the Karo Syrup website." And then: "I was dead wrong."

What changed her mind was a 1925 cookbook from a Sunday school class at the First Baptist Church of Dallas. In it a Mrs. H. W. Woodruff gives a pecan pie of sugar, flour, eggs, pecans, dark Karo, butter and vinegar. It is the earliest recipe Sharpless found that names Karo, and it came from a church member in Texas, not the company.

By the end of the 1920s Southern bakeries sold the pie by brand name. Vieh Bakeries of Memphis advertised "Vieh's Karo Pecan Pie" for 33 cents in 1929. In 1930 a Shreveport cafeteria sold "Our Delicious Karo Pecan Pie" at 10 cents a slice. In February 1931 Mrs. Frank Herring sent the Sallisaw, Oklahoma, paper a version calling for "Karo (blue label)" and cornmeal.

Jean Anderson put the company's role fairly in her American Century Cookbook: "If Karo did not originate pecan pie, it certainly popularized the recipe."

Why is pecan pie a Thanksgiving dessert?

No single event made it one, and the record here is thin. Pecan pie had no place in the 1621 harvest meal, or in the nineteenth-century push that put turkey on the holiday table. In 1898 it was a regional dish that a Texas reader had to explain to a newspaper.

What the record does show is a pie that went national in the 1940s. Anderson found that the Fannie Farmer and Joy of Cooking books began printing recipes for it only in that decade. In Cross Creek Cookery (1942), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, writing from Florida, still treated it as a Southern specialty: "True Southern pecan pie is one of the richest, most deadly desserts of my knowledge."

The advertising followed the calendar. A Karo ad in the Big Spring Daily Herald in Texas in April 1941 sold it as a weeknight treat: "Surprise the Folks with Karo Pecan Pie Tonight." By December 1952 the company was buying space in Better Homes & Gardens for a pie with a "crispy nut-brown top." A Karo booklet from about the early 1960s, Happy Holidays, called its "De Luxe Pecan Pie" "A traditional Southern favorite." The pie was by then about 75 years old.

Pecan pie dates, from the first graft to the state pie

In 2013 the Texas Legislature made pecan pie the official State Pie of Texas. Senate Concurrent Resolution 12 passed the Senate 31 to 0 on March 13 and the House 134 to 0, with two present not voting, on May 17. Its text quotes the 1886 Texas Siftings line about a "real state pie." It then states as fact that around 1930 "the wife of an executive at the Karo Syrup Company combined that product with pecans to make a pie." Mrs. Woodruff's Dallas recipe was 88 years old at the time.

Questions people ask

Was the first pecan pie made with corn syrup?

No. The first pecan pie in print, from Harper's Bazar and Texas Siftings in February 1886, was a milk custard with boiled pecans. Karo corn syrup only went on sale in May 1902, and the earliest recipe Rebecca Sharpless found naming Karo is a 1925 Dallas church cookbook.

Who was the first person to claim pecan pie?

Mrs. Matt Bradley of Grayson County, Texas, wrote to the Dallas Morning News in January 1898 and called her recipe "The Texas Pecan Pie." She said she had never seen it in a paper or cookbook. Her claim is weak, because Harper's Bazar had printed a pecan pie twelve years earlier.

Is the New Orleans origin story for pecan pie true?

There is no evidence for the French colonial story. David Shields calls it "The Louisiana Lie," and John Egerton found no recipes or other proof of early Louisiana pecan candies either. Louisiana's real claim is a syrup pie, from a New Orleans recipe book of about 1900 that credits Slidell.

When did pecan pie become popular across the United States?

Pecan pie went national in the 1940s. Jean Anderson found that the Fannie Farmer and Joy of Cooking books began printing recipes for it only in that decade, and in 1942 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings still described it as a Southern specialty. Karo advertising in the 1940s and 1950s helped spread it.

Filed under Origin Stories, Cultural Identity