The Nutty Bakery Treat That's Been A Southern Staple For Generations

From classic sweet tea to peach cobbler, Southern cuisine is known in part for its dedication to sugar. While confections like banana pudding and butter cookies might be well-known nationwide, some sweet treats have remained a bit more regionally isolated. One such example is pecan tassies. While they're often thought of as bite-sized pecan pies, anyone who's sampled this dessert knows this description is not quite right. Pecan tassies are a sort of hybrid dish, sometimes likened to shortbread. However you define them, they are certainly delicious.

The foundation of pecan tassies are bite-sized shortbread-like shells. Recipes vary, but pecan tassies' exteriors are typically made from a blend of butter, cream cheese, and flour. This dough is then separated into individual flat circles and pressed into muffin tin compartments, making tiny cup-shapes. You fill these cups with a blend of maple syrup, egg, brown sugar, cinnamon, vanilla extract, and ground pecans. Once baked, you've got some seriously adorable cookie pies perfect for a Thanksgiving dessert menu.

While pecan tassies definitely look like mini pecan pies, their flavor profile is quite a bit different. Corn syrup is a key ingredient in pecan pies, responsible for its rich flavor, but it's never present in pecan tassies, with maple syrup being the preferred ingredient. The cream cheese also tempers some of the filling's sweetness, leading to a more tart flavor than one associates with traditional pecan pie.

As with many dishes passed down from one generation to the next, the origins of pecan tassies are a bit murky. Tassie is a Scottish term meaning a small cup, fitting considering these desserts look like tiny cups, but it's unlikely that this dish actually hales from Scotland. Given its similarity to pecan pie, it probably originated in the American south. Pecans are indigenous to the South and became a popular addition to desserts at the dawn of the 20th century. So it stands to reason that pecan tassies, a heavily pecan-centric dish, came about in the region.

The popularity of pecan tassies is likely linked to the history of cream cheese. Cream cheese was not produced at a large scale until the late 1800s, and it took a few more decades for it to really catch on as a baking ingredient. Sometime during the 1950s, more and more cream cheese-based sweets began cropping up in cookbooks. By the 1980s, pecan tassies recipes began to make their first appearances in publications like Better Homes & Gardens and Good Housekeeping. In the South, they've retained their popularity ever since, still a sweet treat enjoyed by many today.