Is Apple Pie Really American? Where the Pie Came From

The oldest apple pie recipe is English

The recipe usually called the oldest apple pie is a single sentence titled "For to make Tartys in Applis." It asks for good apples and spices, figs, raisins and pears, colored with saffron, put in a "cofyn" (a pastry case) and baked. There are no amounts and no sugar. Our English apple pie is the modern descendant: tart cooking apples piled in a deep dish under a single pastry lid, with no bottom crust.

The 1381 date comes with a footnote. The recipe is often credited to The Forme of Cury, the cookery roll compiled around 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II. It actually sits in a second manuscript owned by the antiquary Samuel Pegge, dated August 1381 by a note in the same hand, which he printed as an appendix to his 1780 edition of the roll. Same era and same kind of grand English cooking, but a different document.

The apples were immigrants too

Apples are native to Asia, not North America. The only wild apple the colonists found was the crabapple, small and sour, and they brought European seeds and cuttings with them instead.

In the early years most of that fruit went into cider, which was easier to make than beer and often preferred to water. Apple trees cross easily, and American growers went on to raise many varieties of their own, first for cider and later for eating and baking.

The first American cookbook already had two

By 1796 the pie was settled in. Amelia Simmons's American Cookery, printed in Hartford that year, is listed by the Library of Congress as the first cookbook written by an American and published in the United States, and it has two apple pies.

One stews and strains the apples with lemon peel, cinnamon, mace, rose water and sugar. The other, a "buttered apple pie," bakes quartered tart apples between two crusts, then lifts the lid to add sugar, butter and spice. That second one is recognizably the double-crust pie of our classic American apple pie, with the sugar now going in before baking. The food historian Gabriella Petrick, writing in Smithsonian, adds that colonial crusts turned lighter and flakier because lard was more plentiful in the colonies than beef tallow.

How it became the American symbol

The symbol came later than the pie. By the turn of the 20th century Americans ate more apple pie than any other kind, Petrick writes, and an 1895 New York paper went so far as to call a taste for pie a test of an immigrant's Americanism. When food reformers attacked pie around 1902, its defenders answered in patriotic terms, and World War I sealed the link.

The phrase is often traced to a 1924 Gettysburg Times ad for men's suits. The word researcher Barry Popik has found it earlier, in a 1910 magazine review that called a stage play as American as apple pie. By World War II, the usual story goes, soldiers were telling reporters they were fighting for "mom and apple pie." You can bake the whole line, from the English lid to the American double crust and its regional spinoffs, in our apple pie hub.

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