Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Pie Recipe (Mock Pecan Pie)

History of Old-Fashioned Oatmeal Pie

When you search old-fashioned oatmeal pie online, you’ll find two schools of thought. One claim that’s often repeated is that the recipe originated during the Civil War because pecans were in short supply. The second is that oatmeal pie is a Depression-era dessert. As it turns out, neither of these theories is likely true.

Is oatmeal pie really a Civil War recipe?

No. The story is repeated frequently online, but it doesn’t hold up. Pecan pie itself wasn’t documented in print until 1886, two decades after the war ended, and the only official cookbook of the Confederacy has no recipe for either pecan pie or oatmeal pie. Likewise, Depression-era cookbooks and newspapers make no mention of oatmeal pie or mock pecan pie.

The most often repeated story online goes that during the Civil War, pecans became expensive and scarce, and budget-conscious bakers began making oatmeal pie which is basically pecan pie, except it uses quick oats in place of pecans. It sounds like a plausible story, but it’s just not possible. First and foremost, for that story to be true, pecan pie had to have existed during the Civil War.

The American Civil War took place between 1861 and 1865. The first known published recipe for pecan pie appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1886 – two decades after the Civil War ended. Pecans in general weren’t widely eaten until the late 1800s. They were hugely important in Indigenous diets and culture long before that, but European colonists mostly ignored them in favor of walnuts. If you want to dig deeper into pecans and their place in American food history, check out the book The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut.

If pecan pie, and eventually oatmeal pie, really were popular during the Civil War era, you’d expect pecan pie recipes to turn up in famous Southern cookbooks from that time. The Confederate Receipt-Book is a great place to check, since it’s the only cookbook published by the Confederacy. It came out in 1863 and is full of recipes for stretching food and getting by on very little, exactly the kind of struggle-meal cooking that oatmeal pie would’ve been. Although the book does contain a recipe for mock apple pie, or cracker pie, it doesn’t contain recipes for either pecan pie or oatmeal pie.

Where Did Oatmeal Pie Really Originate, and Is It a Depression-Era Dessert?

Instead of turning up as an alternative to pecan pie, I actually found a few mentions of oatmeal pie that predate pecan pie entirely. In fact, the earliest oatmeal pie recipe I could track down comes from Australia! A July 1873 issue of The Sydney Mail published a recipe for oatmeal pie “for dyspeptics and invalids.”

Although the first recipe for oatmeal pie may have been published in Australia, it seems as though nobody still associated oatmeal pie to Aussie food culture. Instead, it appears as though oatmeal pie or mock pecan pie largely just disappeared until the 1960s. This also largely rules the theory that oatmeal pie or mock pecan pie were Depression-era desserts.

When Did Oatmeal Pie Start Appearing More Frequently?

When oatmeal pie reappeared in publications in the 20th century, it was often also published under the name “mock pecan pie” and touted as a budget-conscious alternative to pecan pie. The first published mention I can find for mock pecan pie is in a 1959 edition of The Toledo Blade in Ohio. The first cookbook I can find that published a recipe for mock pecan pie was Jim Loyd’s Best of the Open Line Cookbook from 1969 published in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The first cookbook recipe for oatmeal pie I can find is from All-Maine Cooking published in 1967.

At some point, the Amish community adopted oatmeal pie, and turned it into a niche Amish pie classic. You can often find oatmeal pie included in Amish cookbooks, and if you search for oatmeal pie today, you’ll find many Amish cooking recipes publishing recipes for Amish oatmeal pie.

Oatmeal pie or mock pecan pie is a niche, old-fashioned dessert that still survives today. Although it may seem as though it’s an extremely old recipe that dates back to the Civil War or the Great Depression, the dessert is actually more modern. For a truly old-school budget pie, try mock apple pie, which uses crackers in place of apple slices!