Boston Cream Pie – Universo da Doçura

Boston cream pie is two layers of yellow butter sponge cake filled with vanilla pastry cream and finished on top with a poured chocolate glaze. It is not a pie. The name comes from the mid-nineteenth century practice of baking cakes and pies in the same interchangeable tins, and the casual use of the terms “pie” and “cake” to describe either. By the time the naming convention became an obvious misnomer, the name had already stuck. The dessert is straightforward in construction — sponge, custard, chocolate — and the quality depends almost entirely on the pastry cream, which needs to be thick enough to hold between the layers without collapsing under the weight of the top round.

The Parker House hotel in downtown Boston created it in 1856, for the hotel’s opening, in the hands of French chef M. Sanzian, who was recruited from France with a salary reportedly more than ten times the average cook’s wage of the time. His original version was called the Parker House Chocolate Cream Pie: a French butter sponge filled with rum-infused pastry cream, the sides coated in toasted sliced almonds, the top covered in chocolate fondant and decorated with a white chocolate spider web. The current version is simpler — the almonds are gone from most iterations, the fondant replaced with ganache — but the basic structure is unchanged. The hotel still serves it. The dessert has a documented predecessor in Washington Pie, a similar layered cake popular before 1856 that lacked the chocolate topping; Sanzian’s chocolate glaze is likely the addition that transformed a regional type into a specific, nameable thing.

Boston cream pie was named the official state dessert of Massachusetts in 1996, beating out the Toll House cookie and the Fig Newton in a vote that apparently required a decision. The Parker House, now the Omni Parker House, has a longer list of cultural associations: Ho Chi Minh worked as a baker in the hotel’s kitchen from 1911 to 1913; Malcolm X was a busboy in the early 1940s; Emeril Lagasse also worked there. JFK proposed to Jackie at Table 40 in Parker’s Restaurant. The Boston cream pie is the most edible thing on that list.

French Influence

Regional Roots

New England