Debunking Viral Recipes: Water Pie

I enjoy watching cooking videos. In recent years, content creators have recreated several historic recipes with results that range from delicious to disgusting. While these videos are highly entertaining, the historian in me often cringes a little (or a lot) because these videos aren’t always based on solid historic evidence.

Water pie, which surged into popularity a few years ago on Tik Tok and other platforms, is a good example. It’s supposedly a recipe from the Great Depression: fill a pie shell with water, sprinkle it with a mixture of flour and sugar (and sometimes vanilla), dot it with butter, and bake. In theory, this results in a plain, but passable, substitute for a custard pie. In reality, most videos end with a wet, soggy mess.

Water pie videos, like this one, raised several questions for me as an historian. I’m going to focus on three. First, is this really an authentic historic recipe? Second, if it is authentic, does it really date to the Great Depression? Third, would cooks in the past have really used this method of sprinkling ingredients over water to make the pie? The answers are yes, no, and probably not.

First, the question of authenticity. Most articles and videos fail to cite an original source for their recipes. By original, I mean an actual historic source, not links to contemporary websites. Fortunately, this time, contemporary articles offered a few clues to the origins of water pie. According to Food 52, B. Dylan Hollis, one of the early Tik Tokers to make the pie, found the recipe in a community cookbook titled 90th Anniversary Cookbook – Women of United Methodist Church, Gordon Nebraska. The recipe was titled “Hard Times Pie 1929.” Another food blogger, Christy Jordan, says that she got the recipe from her friend Kay West, who got it from her grandmother who made it during the Depression. This seems to confirm that it was a recipe with historic origins.

The title of Hollis’s source recipe, “Hard Times Pie, 1929” struck me as odd. The stock market crashed in late October 1929. That date remains in American’s collective historical memory, but most average families did not feel the effects of the Great Depression until the next year. This seemed like a recipe title given long after the fact, leading to my second question: Did this recipe actually originate during the Great Depression?

Many women in the 1930s had recipes that substituted expensive ingredients for cheaper alternatives. My grandmother talked about making vinegar pie as a cheap substitute for lemon pie. I’ve seen many of these “make do” recipes, like pie made with crackers or cakes made without eggs. Recipes like this existed long before the Great Depression. Until the mid-twentieth century, most Americans did not have reliable, year-round access to fresh foods, and periodic food shortages were part of life.

Let’s take pies specifically. Before the twentieth century, fresh fruit was available seasonally, from May or June through November, depending on where one lived. Fresh apples keep for several months, extending the fresh fruit season maybe into February. Between late winter and early summer, fresh fruit was scarce, but dried and canned fruit were available. Commercially canned fruit was prohibitively expensive until the twentieth century. Even though Mason jars were invented in 1858, home canning did not catch on until several years later. Home canning requires specific equipment and access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Poorer families, especially those in urban areas, did not have the luxury of canning their own food.

Custard-based pies also depended on availability of ingredients. Cows and hens produce less in the winter months, making dairy and eggs more expensive. As I wrote about in my post on Living on a Little, in the early 1900s, families spent nearly twice as much on food compared to today. Even middle class families had to be careful with their grocery spending and made pies when ingredients were cheap and in season.

With this context in mind, I turned my attention to newspapers. Everyday recipes, especially those for cooks on a budget, are often passed by word of mouth. I’m not surprised that water pie showed up in a community cookbook, but I would not expect such a recipe to be published in a more formal cookbook. Cookbooks, especially workhorses like The Fanny Farmers Cook Book or Irma Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking, generally feature recipes can be made on middle class budgets. A person who has enough money to buy a cookbook is not looking for a recipe like water pie. Newspapers, on the other hand, were more affordable and tended to publish things that would appeal to their subscribers. The women’s pages of newspapers offer a mix of aspirational and practical tips for household management and cookery.

Thankfully, many newspapers have been digitized, making searching easier. It didn’t take long to find the answer: Water pie is not from the Great Depression. The earliest printed recipe I found was published in The Ventura Post and Daily Democrat (California) in 1886.

Cold Water Pie – A good substitute for custard pie when milk is scarce. Two tablespoonfuls of flour, level, two tablespoonfuls of sugar, heaped, one egg, a lump of butter, the size of a hickory nut, nutmeg to taste, and a good half pint of water. This makes one pie.

Between 1886 and 1889, this recipe was printed at least 90 times in 18 different states. At least a third of the instances were printed with a set of recipes that included gingerbread, stewed potatoes, and something called a “feather cake.” This means that newspaper editors pulled the recipe from a wire service. This recipe does differ from the viral version in that it includes one egg and nutmeg, but the other ingredients match.

Tracking down recipes is tricky since many pass by word of mouth and never make it into print. Water pie likely existed long before 1886. In her 1889 “Household Department” column in The Florida Agriculturalist, author Mrs. J.H. Farr presents water pie as a recipe she learned from a friend. Mrs. Farr’s friend explained that when she came to Florida twenty years ago, fresh food was hard to find. Her cows did not produce much in the Florida heat, and her garden fared poorly in the sandy soil.

“I skip all your recipes which call for cream and over three eggs,” said our economical friend the other day as we seated ourselves in her cheery sitting room for a morning call. “In the first place downright cream is not to be had in these parts, and a pudding or pie with more than three eggs for an ordinary family is a sin.”

I’m not sure if Mrs. Farr’s friend was real or if the interview was a literary convention. Either way, the article highlights the challenges women faced in feeding their families in the nineteenth century. Water pie is not the only survival recipe from the era. I found an even earlier recipe from 1871 for Water Custard Pie that simply says “Some people may like to know that custard made of water, instead of milk, makes a very good pie.” A custard without milk resembles the water pie recipe from the 1880s.

Interestingly, my search of American newspapers available on Newspapers.com between the years 1929 and 1940 did not reveal a single recipe for water pie. That’s not to say water pie was not made during the Depression. The search engine could have missed the recipe, or it could have been printed in a newspaper, magazine, or book that is not in the database. Clearly the recipe was still circulating in the 1930s, but I would not call it popular based on available evidence. What was popular were recipes for hot water pie crust made with lard or shortening and boiling water. I also found several ads in the late 1930s for pie crust mixes promising perfect crust, such as these advertisements for Good Luck Pie Crust from the January 12, 1939 edition of The Morning Union (Springfield, MA) and FIXT Pie Crust Mix from the January 6, 1939 edition of The Atlanta Journal.

Finally, I had questions about the method. Most video recipes pour water directly into a pie shell and sprinkle the remaining ingredients on top. It works, but it’s unusual. Note that the recipe from the 1880s does not include instructions. It was assumed that a cook would know what to do. Since this is a substitute for custard, the cook would know to follow the steps for making a custard.

By the early 1900s, recipes started to include more detailed instructions thanks to the growth of home economics as a professional field. A 1908 recipe for Water Pie submitted to The Fulton Gazette (Fulton, Missouri) by Mrs. Hollis Crews for the newspaper’s cooking contest, provides a cooking method.

Water Pie – One cup sugar, two tablespoons of flour mixed well with the sugar, then add one-half cup of hot water, lump of butter and flavoring, cook until it becomes thick, then pour into your prepared paste and bake slowly.

This version of Water Pie is closer to the Tik Tok version (some versions include vanilla), but the filling is cooked before being transferred to the pie shell. This makes more sense because it would eliminate the wateriness in the pie. Recipes have a way of transforming as they are passed from cook to cook. In the absence of cooking instructions, I can understand why someone might dump all the ingredients into a pie shell.

And there you have it. Water pie is a real historic recipe that dates back to at least 1870s-1880s, not the Great Depression. As with any recipe, it is difficult to know how how often anyone made this pie or how widespread it was. It is safe to say that some cooks found water pie to be a good substitute when milk was in short supply and passed that knowledge along over time.