As American As Apple Pie

Those who savored a piece of apple pie for dessert this Christmas may have some understanding of the answer American soldiers’ shipping out in World War II gave journalists who asked why the young men were willing to fight in the war. With all the bravado of youth, their typical reply was, “for mom and apple pie.” It wasn’t much of a leap from there to the declaration that X, Y or Z was “as American as apple pie.”

But the funny thing is, apple pie is not American.

Apples are not native to North America. Apple trees were not cultivated on the continent until 1625. Which means there was no apple pie at that first Thanksgiving feast in 1621. In addition, the fruitfulness of the trees was dependent on pollination by European honey bees, which also had to be introduced to North America. The Native Americans called the bees “white man’s flies.”

Nor was the pie version of the apple dessert devised by an American. Swedish, Dutch and British immigrants brought recipes from their respective countries, recipes that dated back hundreds of years. The 1390 medieval manuscript “The Forme of Cury” [i.e., The Method of Cookery] gave instructions “For to make Tartys in Applis” [i.e, apple pie):

“Tak gode Applys and gode Spycis and Figys and reysons and Perys and wan they are wel ybrayed colourd with Safron wel and do yt in a cofyn and yt forth to bake wel.” [translation: Take good apples and good spices and figs and pears and when they are well braised, color them well with saffron and put the mixture in a coffin and bake them well.]

A coffin in early medieval cooking was a hard, originally inedible shell made of a thick flour and water paste. Its purpose was to hold in the juices of baking meats or fruits and it was discarded after the meal.

Another recipe written down a hundred and fifty years later (“A Propre new booke of Cokery,” 1545) comes closer to our modern apple pie. Translated to modern English spelling it reads:

“To Make Green Pies… Take your apples and peel them clean and core them as you would a quince [a fruit somewhat of a cross between an apple and a pear] then make your coffin after this manner: take a little fresh water and half a dish of butter and a little saffron and set all this upon a chaffing dish until it becomes hot. Then add this liquid to your flour and the white of two eggs and fashion your coffin. Season your apples with cinnamon, ginger and enough sugar. Put the apple mix into your coffin [i.e., the pie shell] and put butter amounting to half a dish on top of the mixture. Put the top on the coffin and bake.

So if neither apples nor apple pie originated in America, how can something be as American as apple pie?

The answer seems to be that just as apple trees learned to thrive in the new soil, cross breeding and developing new varieties as they spread orchard by orchard across the continent, so too America’s love for apple pie grew with each generation. In the end, using a logic that probably has Aristotle turning over in his coffin, the question seems to be how can something Americans love so much not be American?

A 2014 Huffington Post blog discussing the phrase “as American as apple pie” ends with some food for thought. “So, apple pie as the quintessential American product may be an apt metaphor after all — it was brought here from foreign shores, was influenced by other cultures and immigration patterns, and spread throughout the world by global affairs.”