KENTUCKY DESSERT SUBJECT OF MANY LAWSUITS

In Saving Southern Recipes, Southern Kitchen’s Kate Williams explores the deep heritage of Southern cooking through the lens of passeddown, old family recipes.

There’s nothing like smacking a giant copyright icon on a box of pie to make people want to copy it. Much like McDonald’s Big Mac sauce or the ingredients in Coca-Cola, the recipe for the “true” — or at least most strictly branded — Derby-Pie is shrouded in secrecy. It is also guarded by who I’m assuming are the most litigious pie bakers in the country.

It’s kind of a shame, too, because this pie is one of the most iconic in the South. Full of chocolate and nuts, and perhaps a splash of bourbon, it’s a slightly heartier version of pecan pie, and one that’s made differently by just about every baker. But no one, except for the Kern’s Kitchen pie company, can call it by its true name.

George Kern first baked the pie in 1950 at the Melrose Inn in Prospect, Kentucky. As legend goes, the family came up with the pie’s name by drawing various options out of a hat. In 1968, it had become so popular that the family registered its name, hyphen and all, with the U.S. Patent Office. It has been vigorously defending the name ever since.

Kern’s Kitchen famously sued Bon Appetit magazine in the 1980s for publishing a recipe for Derby Pie and, in the last few decades, Kern’s has brought plenty more suits against restaurants and websites — even those as smallfry as homegrown food blogs.

So my recipe below is for “chocolate and nut Kentucky pie.” It is, in true Kern family tradition, made with walnuts, not pecans, and I’ve called the bourbon addition optional. Indeed, the trademarked version of this pie is actually booze-free; according to the Kern’s website, matriarch Leaudra Kern would occasionally sneak a tipple into her whipped cream topping, but it didn’t go into the pie itself.

I cobbled the recipe together from a few different sources, and it’s actually more like a chocolate chip cookie surrounded by pie crust than a pecan pie. I baked it all in a homemade pie crust, but you could certainly use pre-made. One of my colleagues suggests spreading a layer of caramel across the crust before adding the filling, and I completely support that idea. Whatever you do, though, just get creative with its name. Do you have a beloved family recipe to share? Send a picture of the recipe card or a typed-out version of the recipe to kate@southernkitchen.com.