Butter, eggs, farming-village appetites…and delicious old Norwegian pie recipes.
My mother grew up in New Richland, Minnesota, a small town with a large Norwegian-American population.
This meant that she acquired—and handed down to me—a variety of recipes (mostly for desserts) that use large quantities of butter and eggs.
She wouldn’t make the New Richland Chocolate Pie very often, because she said it was too rich.
As a child, it was one of my favorite recipes because it called for “butter the size of an egg,” which I thought was a pretty cool way to measure something.
Only later did I realize that it was common to use measures like that before the days of measuring cups and spoons.
New Richland also produced a rich butterscotch pie, which to my surprise has no butter in it.
Both pies are served with generous piles of whipped cream, making up for any shortage of butter fat!