Sugar Cream Pie · Pie Gets Me Out of Bed

Sugar cream pie is an open pie of sugar and cream thickened with flour or cornstarch and seasoned with nutmeg or vanilla. It is often called Indiana’s unofficial state pie and was popularized commercially by Wick’s Pies of Winchester. The Indiana Senate voted in 2009 to make it the state pie, and sources disagree on whether that made it official.

The Indiana Historical Society finds only one constant ingredient: sugar. Most recipes add cream or milk, seasonings such as cinnamon, nutmeg and vanilla, and a thickener such as flour or cornstarch. Eggs are a point of contention. Some Hoosier bakers hold that a pie with eggs is a custard pie, and the Society’s staff concluded that a sugar cream pie can have eggs but probably should not.

No original recipe survives. The Historical Society suggests the pie probably began with Shaker communities in Indiana or Pennsylvania and arose separately in Amish baking. Indiana Foodways Alliance director Susan Haller told the Ball State Daily News in 2009 that early nineteenth-century Quakers in eastern Indiana invented it. Visit Indiana credits the Amish and Shakers. The Society found cream pie recipes in twelve of the fourteen historic cookbooks it examined, and found that the full name “sugar cream pie” did not become common until after the Second World War. It is often classed as a desperation pie, made from pantry staples when fruit was scarce.

Wick’s Pies in Winchester made the pie familiar beyond the farm kitchen. WFYI dates the company’s sugar cream pie to 1944, when Duane Wickersham opened his first restaurant in Randolph County; State Sen. Allen Paul gave the founding year as 1943 in 2009. NPR reported in 2012 that Wickersham patented his family’s recipe in 1962 and that the family does not share it. In 2017 the company told WFYI that about 75 percent of what it sells is sugar cream pie.

On January 22, 2009, the Indiana Senate passed a resolution, written with Ball State University students and the Indiana Foodways Alliance and sponsored by Sen. Allen Paul, to make sugar cream pie the official state pie. Senators also voted to name Winchester the sugar cream pie capital. WFYI reported in 2017 that the measure, which would have renamed the dessert “Hoosier pie,” never reached the governor’s desk, and the state tourism office calls it Indiana’s unofficial state pie. The Crown Point Community Library describes it as the official state pie, designated in 2009, and the Indiana Historical Society calls it “our official state pie.”

Indiana is assigned to this style on the strength of the 2009 Senate resolution and the documented Hoosier tradition, with the resolution’s final status shown as disputed.

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