Chess pie
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Chess pie is a dessert characteristic of Southern U.S. cuisine. Recipes vary, but are generally similar in that they call for the preparation of a single crust and a filling comprised of eggs, butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla. Some recipes call for corn syrup; however, this tends to create a gelatinous consistency. The pie is then baked. The resulting pie is very sweet and often consumed with coffee in order to offset this somewhat. The preparation of a pecan pie is essentially similar, with the addition of pecans.
The pie seems to have no relation to the game of chess, which has led to much speculation as to the origin of this term. Some theorize that the name of the pie traces back to its ancestral England, where the dessert perhaps evolved from a similar cheese tart, in which the archaic "cheese" was used to describe pies of the same consistency even without that particular ingredient present in the recipe. In North Carolina and Old Salem Cookery, Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks argues that the name derives from Chester, England. One folk etymology suggests that that it was referred to as "just pie", which soon shortened to "jus' pie" and then corrupted to "chess pie".
