NYT Connections puzzle No. 1,075 for May 21, 2026 put pies, mustard and tennis terms on the same board, and the answer set included shoofly pecan pumpkin. The completed grid also tied a green category to things associated with butts, with caboose, can, moon and peach filling that group.
The puzzle’s central theme was kinds of pies, and the four answers there were chess, pecan, pumpkin and shoofly. That made shoofly pecan pumpkin the clearest set on a board that also asked players to spot a purple group built around ____ mustard, solved by Colonel, honey, hot and yellow.
Connections puzzles are built around four-word groupings, and this one leaned on wordplay that mixed food, sports and slang. The tennis scoring terms group brought in advantage, deuce, forty and love, giving the May 21 page one of those boards that looks straightforward only after the answers are in place.
What keeps a puzzle page like this from feeling routine is the way one category can hide in plain sight while another appears almost too obvious. Here, the pie set carried the headline value, but the green butt-associated group and the mustard phrase both helped show why No. 1,075 rewarded players who could move quickly between literal meanings and oddball associations.
That is the point of the May 21, 2026 hints-and-answers page: it gave solvers the finished map for every category, including the pie theme, the mustard clue and the tennis terms, after a puzzle that asked readers to sort words that looked unrelated until the last piece clicked into place. For anyone still working through the board, shoofly pecan pumpkin was not a trick at all — it was the day’s cleanest path through the puzzle.
