Surprise Pie with Pears & Ginger

How Another Family's Recipe Brought My Community Together

Several years ago, I spotted something that belonged to an ex-boyfriend in my kitchen drawer. On a yellow index card in unfamiliar handwriting was the recipe for surprise pie, a speciality of his Virginian family.

Surprise pie gets its name from a layer of fruit—the index card suggests canned peaches in syrup—stirred into a batter of butter, milk, sugar and self-rising flour. The cake puffs as it bakes, hiding the fruit inside. On a whim, I made one in my New York City kitchen with a pint of blueberries I'd bought at the farmers' market earlier that afternoon.

It was delicious, the perfect vehicle for ripe summer fruit. And so, I started making surprise pies regularly. I tinkered with the recipe over the years, swapping in apricots or plums, adding citrus zest plus spices like cardamom or nutmeg, and using baking powder and salt instead of self-rising flour. I made versions in different-shaped pans, and sometimes put in so much fruit the pie cratered around it, spoiling the surprise but adding juicy flavor and texture.

Eventually, I made so many iterations that I began to wonder about the origins of the recipe. Surprise pie is so crowd-pleasing and accessible, I figured it must be a widespread cultural phenomenon, like baseball or the Beyoncé catalog.

Surprisingly, it isn't. In the 10-plus years that I've been baking surprise pie, I've never seen anything similar on a menu or in a cookbook. Online search results for the term "surprise pie" include meringue-like desserts with whipped egg whites, no-bake cream cheese pies and lattice-crusted cranberry pies. Historically, surprise pies took a darker turn. In 16th-century France, royal courts reportedly prepared cage-like pastries that were served with live fowl inside. When a diner cut into the dough, a flock of birds would fly out.

Confident that my surprise pie experimentations were nowhere near that unsettling, I still felt uneasy taking ownership of the dish. Is it OK to make another family's recipe without ever telling them? Was I unwittingly committing some sort of dessert erasure?

Then, in March 2020, the pandemic arrived, priorities shifted, and people who had never so much as held a whisk began fervently baking. Those with the means to stay indoors started nurturing sourdough starters and Instagramming banana breads as a way to quell their nerves and fill their hours. As the weeks stretched into months, a friend who was quarantining alone in a small Brooklyn apartment asked if I could teach her something to bake over Zoom. "What's an easy dessert I can make with stuff I already have in my fridge?" she asked.

I felt honored to share the surprise pie recipe with her, explaining how I'd come across it by chance and how versatile it could be. My friend baked it a lot that spring and summer, occasionally leaving wrapped slices outside her door for her neighbors and mail carrier. It was a source of community and connection, a sweet Southern comfort food for scared New Yorkers.

To me, this is what makes cooking so special. It feeds us physically and emotionally, and adapts in tandem with our lives and circumstances. While I firmly believe that it's important to contextualize what and how we cook, like all cultural expressions, food is forever evolving. The version of surprise pie that I like to bake in the fall has gingered pears in lieu of canned peaches and some whole-wheat flour in the mix, but it's a proud descendant of its forebear.