The North of France is the largest sugar-producing region of France. It has been ever since the British navy imposed the Continental blockade at the beginning of the nineteenth century, depriving France of cane sugar from its overseas colonies and prompting Napoleon to reward anyone who could apply a newly-discovered technique for producing sugar from beets on a commercial scale. The North quickly became a center of production of the precious commodity, and it is surely no coincidence that this is the only region where people use brown sugar (called vergeoise here), not only in desserts like the sumptuous sugar tart (tarte au sucre) with its light or dark brown-sugar filling, but in savory dishes prepared Ã* la flamande, including the local blood sausage (boudin), sweet-sour red cabbage (chou rouge), and beef stewed in beer (carbonade).
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Sugar pie is a typical dessert of northern France, Belgium and Quebec. It is a single crust pie with a filling made from flour, butter, salt, vanilla, cream, and brown sugar or maple syrup (sometimes both). When baked, these ingredients combine into a homogenous mixture similar to caramel. If maple syrup is used it might be referred to as maple pie.
It is vaguely reminiscent of an American "transparent pie" (the name in the Midwestern and Southern US for a version of pecan pie without the pecans), of English Canadian butter tarts, or of English treacle tart
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Try searching some of the other names the pie goes by and you can talk about that. i.e. In America it's called transparent pie and ...
