Southern buttermilk pie

Southern cooks have a way with buttermilk. It’s a brilliant “secret” ingredient in biscuits, fried chicken, salad dressings, sheet cakes, cornbread and countless other dishes. One of my all-time favorite uses for it is in buttermilk pie. The recipe below transforms a few simple ingredients into a sublime dessert that would make any Southern cook proud.

It’s easy to confuse buttermilk pie with chess pie, another distinctly Southern dessert that combines milk, sugar, butter and eggs into a luscious pie filling. The difference between the two is that buttermilk pie relies on the acid in the buttermilk to thicken the filling by reacting with the egg, whereas chess pie filling uses regular milk and is thickened with cornmeal.