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.

Servings: 8
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 55 minutes
Total Time: 1 hr, 5 minutes

Ingredients
3 large eggs
1-1/2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
pinch of salt
1 9-inch pie crust

Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Whisk the eggs and sugar together in a large bowl.

3. Add the sugar, melted butter, flour, buttermilk, lemon juice, vanilla, nutmeg and salt and whisk until well-combined.

4. Whisk in remaining ingredients until smooth.

5. Pour the mixture into the unbaked pie crust.

6. Bake in the preheated oven for 10 minutes, and reduce the heat to 350 degrees F and continue baking for about 45 minutes more until the filling is set and the top is golden brown.