shoofly pie

9.6

A sweet open pie that uses molasses and a crumb topping

noun
/ˈʃuːflaɪ paɪ/

: pastel shoofly

In Pennsylvania Dutch culture, shoofly pie is a beloved dessert often served during holiday celebrations.

Examples

I love shoofly pie!
Have you ever tried shoofly pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream?
My grandmother baked a delicious shoofly pie for the family gathering.
The bakery is famous for its traditional shoofly pie recipe.
Have you ever tried shoofly pie?
At the county fair, I treated myself to a slice of shoofly pie, which was filled with sweet molasses and topped with crumbles.
During the family reunion, Grandma brought her famous shoofly pie, and everyone eagerly gathered around to enjoy a piece.

Synonyms

pie

vsshoofly pie

696 1.0

A baked pastry with a sweet or savory filling

is a regional open dessert filled with molasses and crumb topping

shoofly

vsshoofly pie

9.9

A sweet pie made with molasses or a person who watches and warns others

is the specific open molasses dessert with crumb topping from Pennsylvania Dutch tradition

How Sweet

fudge

92 1.0

sticky toffee pud

8.6

shoofly pie

9.6

apple pie

41 1.0

tart

93 1.6

Surface Forms

shoofly pie singular

shoofly pies plural

Morphology

shoofly + pie

Although 'pie' signals the lexical category (a kind of pastry), the element 'shoofly' is a dialectal/historical lexical item whose meaning (a molasses crumb-topped pie) is not compositionally derived from its surface parts and is not predictable from general English morphology. A B1 learner who only knows the literal words would at best guess it is some kind of pie but would not be able to infer the specific traditional molasses-and-crumb meaning, so the expression is idiomatic and non‑compositional.

Etymology

The noun shoofly pie comes from a simple kitchen picture: the sweet molasses crumbs were left to cool and flies often came, so someone had to shoo the flys away. That's why the name came to mean a 'sweet molasses crumb pie'.