Some recipes just can’t get a break.
Beaten biscuits, dump cake, and Kentucky sawdust pie must have been named by people who never made them. Did they not know how good they taste?
Take that ooey-gooey sawdust pie. It originated in the 1970s with the late Patti Tullar, who, along with her husband Bill, opened a motel, restaurant, and ice cream parlor in Grand Rapids, Kentucky, what was a sleepy little town about 30 minutes east of Paducah.
The gooey pie is a mix of chopped pecans, coconut, egg whites, sugar, and graham cracker crumbs, which is baked and topped with sliced bananas and whipped cream. It became a favorite with tourists at Patti’s 1880s Restaurant. But it was relatively unknown until Patti received a letter from Bon Appetit magazine in 1983 asking for the recipe.
A reader from St. Louis had enjoyed a slice while visiting Kentucky. While Patti normally didn’t give out her recipes, this was too good of a marketing opportunity. So she sent the magazine the recipe, and thereafter her sawdust pie was on the map.
Why the Name ‘Sawdust’?
Sawdust is the dust from milling lumber, and it’s what hams in Maryland and Virginia were smothered in before smoking.
If you taste sawdust pie, rest assured no sawdust will pass your lips. It’s more the color and texture of the pie that might have reminded Patti’s children of sawdust when they named it 50 years ago.
But the pie itself is even older. It’s a Depression pie dating back to when people would bake with graham cracker crumbs or oats if they didn’t have pecans. The original pie might have contained almonds, and it could have been German. Patti’s grandmother was German, and she was the one who influenced her cooking the most, Patti shares in a 1997 cookbook called Miss Patti’s Cook Book. In the Patti’s Pie chapter, Patti’s Sawdust Pie is the first recipe.
She writes in the book’s foreword how this mother of four came to settle in western Kentucky after being raised in Chicago and her family lived on the West Coast, in Hawaii, and in Germany. Her father was an architect who designed the Warner Brothers theaters of the 1930s in and around Chicago.
When the family moved to Tucson because of the parents’ declining health, Patti became the home cook with the help of her grandmother. At 14, she received a Sunbean Mix Master to speed along the process, and her love affair with cooking began.
Credit:
Caitlin Bensel; Food Stylist: Torie Cox
Sawdust Pie, a Kentucky Tradition
In 1975, she and her husband bought an old motel in an area of Kentucky he knew from business. It straddled Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. This was the beginning of a Patti’s lodging and restaurant empire called Patti’s 1880 Settlement. In 1996, Patti’s received a Southern Living reader’s choice award.
Sadly, Patti developed Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1995, and a year later, Bill developed chronic lung disease. Realizing they had little time left, they wrote the cookbook to tell their story of their family, their journey, and their famous pie.
Dining and Cooking