Boston cream pie is a sponge cake filled with custard and glazed with chocolate, and Massachusetts law names it the official state dessert. The Omni Parker House claims it, though the date and even the chef’s name are disputed. The word pie in its name is usually explained by a time when cakes were baked in pie tins.
The dessert belongs to the Parker House, now the Omni Parker House, on School Street in Boston. Boston.com reported in 2023, citing the hotel’s historian Susan Wilson, that the French chef Augustine François Anezin created it around the time of the Civil War and that it appeared on the hotel menu in 1865. CooksInfo gives a different account: a “Pudding Pie Cake” recipe in the New York Herald in 1855, and the Parker House serving it with a chocolate glaze in 1856 under a pastry chef it names as Sanzian.
The chef’s name is itself contested. Wilson told Boston.com that Anezin’s name is widely misreported as Sanizan, probably because a 1925 Boston Globe interview misprinted it, and that the error has been copied ever since. She said early menus show related desserts under other names, among them American Pudding Pie, Washington Pie and Chocolate Cream Pie, and that menus alone cannot say what each one contained.
The name came later, by the hotel historian’s account. Wilson dates the use of “Boston Cream Pie” to the second half of the 20th century and links it to Betty Crocker, whose boxed mix went on sale in 1958, according to Boston.com. The name appears in print in the 19th century as well. The Granite Iron Ware Cook Book, issued by the St. Louis Stamping Company and dated 1878 in the Internet Archive’s catalog, prints a “Boston Cream Pie”: a “crust part” of eggs, sugar, flour and baking powder baked in two pie tins, each layer split and spread with a cooked cream of milk, eggs, flour and sugar, with no chocolate. CooksInfo records an 1882 Marion Harland recipe for individual “Boston Cream Cakes,” and Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) prints Boston Cream Cakes as well.
In 1996 Massachusetts made the dessert official after a civics class from Norton High School found a sponsor for the bill, according to State Symbols USA and Boston.com. The statute reads: “The Boston cream pie shall be the official dessert or dessert emblem of the commonwealth.” Boston.com reports that it beat the Toll House cookie, Fig Newtons and Indian pudding.
Omni Parker House staff explain the name by bakeware. “Originally, the cake was baked in pie tins,” chef Gerard Tice told Boston.com, adding that the base is a sponge cake. Wilson said: “It’s never been a pie, never will be a pie. It’s always a cake.” State Symbols USA gives the same explanation for the name, that the recipe dates from a time when the same pans served for cakes and pies.
The dictionaries leave the matter open. Merriam-Webster’s first sense of pie requires a filling in a pastry shell, topped with pastry or both, and Boston cream pie has neither. Merriam-Webster nonetheless lists Boston cream pie among its phrases containing the word pie.