Hometown Cooking with Margo Bond Collins

Hi, everyone! I’m Margo Bond Collins, and I write for Entangled’s Red-Hot Bliss line. My Hometown Heroes series is set in Fort Worth, Texas, and my heroes and heroines are definitely fond of hometown cooking!

One of my family’s favorite holiday cooking traditions is serving buttermilk pie made from my grandmother’s recipe. And in my forthcoming book Opposing the Cowboy, LeeAnn and Jonah spend some time in search of the perfect dessert–and buttermilk pie is definitely in the running!

This is a type of chess pie–in fact, some of the older versions of recipes for it call it a buttermilk chess pie–and the trick to testing to see if a chess pie is “set” is to slide a cold, clean table knife into the center. If the knife comes out clean, the pie is ready.

Finally, the recipe below doesn’t include any information about pie crusts. In my family, my husband is in charge of those; if it were up to me, we would always have the store-bought kind!

buttermilk-pie
Makes two buttermilk pies

3 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup butter
1 cup buttermilk
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 375.

In a mixer (set on low), combine eggs, vanilla, and buttermilk until well mixed. Add sugar and flour, continuing to mix well. Finally, add butter (still cold). When butter is spread evenly throughout mixture, pour into two uncooked pie shells. Cover the edges of the crust with foil to avoid burning.

Cook at 375 for about 45 minutes, until pie is set.