Chess pie is a dessert characteristic of Southern U.S. cuisine. Recipes vary, but are generally similar in that they call for the preparation of a single crust and a filling comprised largely of corn syrup. The resulting pie is very sweet and often consumed with coffee in order to offset this somewhat. The preparation of a pecan pie is essentially similar, with the addition of a final step of topping the pie with pecans immediately before baking it.

The pie seems to have no relation to the game of chess, which has led to much speculation as to the origing of this term. Some theorize that the name of the pie traces back to its ancestral England, where the dessert perhaps evolved from a similar cheese tart, in which the archaic "cheese" was used to describe pies of the same consistancy even without that particular ingredient present in the recipe. North Carolina and Old Salem Cookery author Elizabeth Hedgecock Sparks gave the explanation that it came from Chester, England. One folk etymology suggests that the origin comes from the saying that the pie was not of any particular type but rather "just pie", which soon shortened to "jus' pie" and then corrupted to "chess pie".