Growing up, I celebrated many holidays in a log cabin. My Uncle Bob built it by hand. It was the perfect setting for Thanksgiving dinners, Memorial Day barbecues, etc. And the perfect dessert was the homemade apple pie that Aunt Joan placed upon her red and white checkered tablecloth.
What could be more American than that?
And yet, apple pie isn't American.
According to the "Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America," the pies enjoyed in America were first popular in England. They were a staple for the colonists because piecrusts used less flour than bread and did not require a complicated brick oven for baking.
The pies allowed settlers to stretch meager provisions. However, idyllic images of pies on windowsills wouldn't be quite accurate. These were pies for harder times. Heavy crusts made of rough flour mixed with suet tasted more utilitarian than heavenly.
Against the popular notion of the pies being a symbol of America, Alice Ross from journalofantiques.com points out that they were popular in the motherland first.
"The crust (wheat flour and lard) was intrinsically English, as were the apples, butter, and even bread crumb thickeners. And the sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg came from the far-flung British Empire to enrich the affluent British pantry. Indeed, the pie form itself was an English specialty, and unrivaled in other European cuisine," Ross writes on her Web site.
As the new land's orchards matured, fruit pies' popularity increased. Primitive pies sometimes had cream and egg custard mixtures and used reconstituted dried apples. But eventually the pies that filled tins and redware plates evolved into the shape of the pies found on my Aunt Joan's table: rounded crusts, rolled and crimped.
That is, before Uncle Bob and Aunt Joan sold the cabin and moved to Florida. And so goes the flow of people. Just like this great country, the apple pie, at its core, is really a story of migration.
According to Ross, most apple varieties originated in the Middle East. The fruit was then introduced to Europe by the conquering Roman legions. The apple's first appearance in New Jersey is estimated to be around 1632, according to the "Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink," and John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, took it from there.
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