Take anything away, but leave pie.1 Americans can stand the prohibition of intoxicating drinks; but I believe the prohibition of pie would precipitate a revolution.
—David Macrae
And we must have a pie. Stress cannot exist2 in the presence of a pie.
—David Mamet
Remember when we learned about the Boston Tea Party in middle school—how a secret society of armed radicals bled 342 casks of tea valued at roughly £9,6503 into Boston Harbor? And how that single act of defiance was supposed to represent the sum of the American spirit at conflict with the insufferable evils of British tyranny, thus charting a course for revolution?
Well, it was pretty damn American, sure, especially the parts about Bostonians polluting their own harbor and painting their faces with coal dust to disguise themselves as Native Americans; however, it wasn’t the only symbolic food fight to represent, and fuel, the fight for American independence—nor was it the most impactful.
In fact, some people, like nineteenth-century physician F. W. Searle4, might argue that the American Revolution would never have happened had it not been for the influence of pie, a dish often served as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack in the colonies.
A learned doctor, Searle wrote about pie as though it were the stuff of Arthurian legend, crediting it with the colonies’ “indomitable perseverance, never failing strength, and don’t-know-when-you’r beaten courage” and predicting that “when the history of New England shall be written in that spirit of careful investigation and research, and with that calm and dispassionate temper, which ought to animate every historian, then it will undoubtedly be found that the indigestible pie has exerted a mighty influence in the development and utilization of the resources of our country, and that pie and progress have always gone hand in hand.”
Searle believed “that a certain amount of irritation within ‘the inwards’ of a man” made him tougher and more resilient, that American pie had a tendency to irritate a man’s inwards “just sufficiently to make him wide awake, resourceful, and aggressive” and that calling pie “indigestible” was therefore a compliment.
“The brave men who made up the Boston Tea Party,” he writes, “and who defied the whole English nation rather than pay an unjust tax, were pie-biters from Boston. The bands of untrained stragglers who defeated a disciplined army at Concord, at Lexington and Bunker Hill, sprung from the Puritan stock which introduced and made famous the American pie. The history of New England shows conclusively that the Yankee pie is a mighty stimulator of energy and that it is conducive to vigilance, aggressiveness and longevity.”
This was all published as scientific fact in 1898’s Journal of Medicine and Science.
And Searle wasn’t wrong;* the history he describes has just been largely forgotten.
Indeed, pie—particularly apple pie—has an important place in American history. It’s as American as, well, apple pie: the ultimate symbol, and product, of American independence, innovation, experimentation, and excess.
And what makes it so American isn’t its lineage—as the first recipe for a crude apple pie comes from 1381 England,5 while the apple itself originated from the mountainous regions of Central Asia known today as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan6—but rather the fact that we stole it from the British along with our independence, thus liberating it from the tyranny of British cooking, which at the time consisted primarily of pies stuffed with birds and nightmarish sea creatures. Consider the British eel pie, lamprey pie, pigeon pie, and swan pie, traditionally served cold.
Did you know that the secret to a nice lamprey pie, according to a recipe from 1737 London, is to “cleanse them well from the slime”7 before you mix their blood with cinnamon? If you plan on helping yourself to a slice afterward, it’s probably also a good idea not to stare too long into their jawless parasitic sucker heads.
The trick with pigeon pie, in case you’re curious, is to add lamb’s stones, also known as lamb’s testicles, or to top it with a “ragoo” of cocks-combs.8
Of course, other recipes were simpler, say, for example, that for the English hare pie, comprising just six steps: “Get a hare, cut it in pieces,9 break the bones, and season it to your taste, and lay it in the pye with sliced lemon, and butter and close the same.”
Because forks weren’t common before industrialization*10,11 and most people ate with their hands or a pair of knives, a lot of early pie recipes called for keeping the bones inside12, as this gave diners something to hold on to—and, as a bonus, imparted more flavor and gelatin (for thickening). Meanwhile, to “close” the pie meant closing the “coffyn,” which was what the British appropriately called their inedible crusts. This wasn’t an insult or a jab; rather, their crusts were intentionally inedible. Thick, hard, and meant to be tossed uneaten, they were viewed merely as disposable vessels for baking, handling, and storing their innards in the absence of modern bakeware or aluminum foil. This is why even today, British pie crusts are thicker and harder than American crusts, a relic of their heritage as the inedible Tupperware of the Dark Ages—which were, indeed, dark times for pie. So saying that British pies belong in coffyns would have been accurate on several levels.
Other recipes from the same cookbook—verbosely titled The Whole Duty of a Woman: or, an Infallible Guide to the Fair Sex. Containing, Rules, Directions, and Observations, for their Conduct and Behaviour through All Ages and Circumstances of Life, as Virgins, Wives, or Widows. With Directions, How to Obtain All Useful and Fashionable Accomplishments Suitable to the Sex. In Which Are Comprised All Parts of Good Housewifry, Particularly Rules and Receipts in Every Kind of Cookery—include those for pies made of lamb, veal, calves’ foot, calf’s head, squab, venison, goose, giblet, pigeon, rabbit, turkey, eel, trout, and oyster.
But not apple.
And when the English did use apples, in their pies or elsewhere, they treated them largely as vegetables,13 adding them to various meat concoctions alongside onions or potatoes. Even English applesauce was savory rather than sweet. Called apulmose, it was traditionally made with beef broth14 or, during Lent, with cod’s liver.15
So pie, in precolonial England, was largely utilitarian: far from being a delicacy or dessert, it was merely a convenient way of congealing various bits of bird and beast into something portable and relatively stable. Its name comes from the magpie16, a member of the crow family that was commonly colloquialized as pie in the Middle Ages, though it’s unclear whether this namesake had to do with baking magpies in coffyns or the birds’ reputation for stealing random objects to incorporate into their nests in much the same way British cooks tossed random animal parts into pies. (Nests and early pies would have also shared a rough resemblance owing to their rustic layers and golden-brown coloring.)
It would make sense if the phrase “eating humble pie” had been coined to describe these humble roots and practices, but the truth is, perhaps, less appetizing, as the word humble comes from the Middle English umble,17 which refers to the inner waste parts of animals. So umble pie was what servants made for themselves using the pig or deer guts left over from the fancier lord’s or noble’s pies described earlier.
Yet all of this changed with the colonization of America—an experiment not just in democracy and liberty but in survival, scale, excess, and New World cookery.
“When European colonists first landed18 in America they found not only Indians, virgin lands, and an alien style of life,” writes historian Sally Smith Booth, “but the world’s largest outdoor supermarket. Ducks, geese, and pigeons by the millions filled the skies. Forests abounded with deer, hare, squirrels, and quail. In rivers and on seashores thrived giant shad, eels, mussels, lobsters five feet long, and crabs said to be big enough to feed four men each. Trees hung heavy with wild fruits and berries. Vegetables, such as potatoes, squash, corn, and pumpkin, covered the rolling meadows.”
This New World wasn’t rich just in spices but in fish, game, birds, berries, vegetables, and grain; the lands and waters were teeming with new ingredients the colonists had never seen or heard of, and the ingredients they had seen before tended to be larger, sweeter, and more plentiful than their European counterparts.
Still, there’s a reason these first few years were called the “starving times”;19 however, the staggering number of early colonists who starved to death did so not because of a lack of food but because of a lack of skill in acquiring it, an unwillingness to heed the advice of the natives, whom they saw as uncivilized savages, and a reluctance to try new foods. Surrounded by birds they couldn’t catch, fish they couldn’t hook, deer they couldn’t shoot, and corn they were afraid to eat, they initially survived by eating whatever they could scavenge, which often meant things like acorns, ants, bats, cats, dogs, horses, and boiled shoe leather.
“Though there be fish20 in the sea, foules in the ayre, and beasts in the woods,” writes John Smith in 1608, “their bounds are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot much trouble them.”
Smith recounts, for example, coming across waters so thick with fish that their heads stuck out above the water, yet being unable to catch any “for want of nets.”
“We attempted to catch21 them with a frying pan,” he writes, “but we found it a bad instrument to catch fish with: neither better fish, more plenty, nor more variety for smal fish, had any of us ever seene in any place so swimming in the water, but they are not to be caught with frying pans.”
Yet within a generation, people were eating better in the New World22 than in the Old World they’d left behind, having acquired not just a taste for New World foods but the skill and equipment (e.g., fishing nets) by which to acquire them.
In 1614, just six years after his failed attempt to fish with frying pans, Smith describes hooking fish with such ease that even “a little boye”23 could do it.
“You shall scarce finde any baye, shallow shore, or cove of sand,” he writes, “where you may not take many clampes, or lobsters, or both at your pleasure, and in many places lode your boat if you please; nor iles where you finde not fruits, birds, crabs, and muskles, or all of them, for taking, at a lowe water. And in the harbors we frequented, a little boye might take of cunners, and pinacks, and such delicate fish, at the ships sterne, more then sixe or tenne can eate in a daie.”
And the amount of food the weakest boy could take home seems to have been a common measurement in the colonies. Francis Higginson, the first Puritan minister of Salem, writes in 1629 of lobsters so great, fat, and luscious, and the waters so full of them, that “the least boy in the plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them,”24 while he complains of becoming “cloyed with them.” Others describe lobsters six feet long25, weighing up to twenty-five pounds and washing up on beaches in piles two feet high.
All this while most of Europe was living on bread and porridge.26
The same abundance held true for crab, mussels, bass, salmon, flounder, and herring. John Lawson, who kept a journal of almost everything he ate in his eight years in Carolina (he once ate “fat barbacu’d Venison”27 on a Thursday),* describes a single cockle the size of five or six in England,28 stingrays at almost every door, and oysters or mussels, as many as you please, in every pond or creek.
And that was just the fish menu.
Others describe great migrations of birds so numerous29 they were forced to roost on top of one another, downing giant oaks from their weight and covering the forest in four inches of droppings. John James Audubon later described flocks so dense they eclipsed the sun and estimated seeing more than a billion pigeons in a three-hour span. To save on gunpowder and ammunition, colonists would often net and club birds to death, capturing some fifteen hundred at a time.
And perhaps more impressive than the number of birds was their size. Colonists describe mystery birds with heads “as big as a child’s30 of a year old” and flocks of five hundred wild turkeys weighing forty to sixty pounds each. Lawson writes of half a turkey feeding eight hungry men two meals31 each, and Higginson, the same guy who complained of becoming cloyed on lobster, describes their meat as exceedingly “fat, sweet and fleshy.”32
And don’t get the colonists started on the superiority of American bear meat.
“The Flesh of this Beast33 is very good, and nourishing, and not inferiour to the best Pork in Taste,” writes Lawson. “It stands betwixt Beef and Pork, and the young Cubs are a Dish for the greatest Epicure living. I prefer their Flesh before any Beef, Veal, Pork, or Mutton; and they look as well as they eat, their fat being as white as Snow, and the sweetest of any Creature’s in the World. . . . Those that are Strangers to it, may judge otherwise; But I who have eaten a great deal of Bears Flesh in my Life-time (since my being an Inhabitant in America) do think it equalizes, if not excels, any Meat I ever eat in Europe. The Bacon made thereof is extraordinary Meat.”
And if this weren’t reason enough to eat bear meat, it was also believed to give those who consumed it “great sexual prowess,”34 while bear oil (meaning its melted caul fat) was good for drinking (Lawson describes drinking a quart of it35 without vomiting!) and for rubbing on your skin to ward off mosquitoes.
So there was plenty to eat in terms of both quality and quantity. In fact, in 1765, several years before the Boston Tea Party, a writer in London36 pompously argued that colonists would never survive without British tea, suggesting it was the only decent food staple the colonies had—which prompted Benjamin Franklin, of all people, to pen an open letter in response:
Does he imagine we can get nothing else37 for breakfast?—Did he never hear that we have oatmeal in plenty, for water gruel or burgoo; as good wheat, rye and barley as the world affords, to make frumenty; or toast and ale; that there is every where plenty of milk, butter and cheese; that rice is one of our staple commodities; that for tea, we have sage and bawm* in our gardens, the young leaves of the sweet hickory or walnut, and above all, the buds of our pine, infinitely preferable to any tea from the Indies; while the islands yield us plenty of coffee and chocolate?—Let the gentleman do us the honour of a visit in America, and I will engage to breakfast him every day in the month with a fresh variety, without offering him either tea or Indian corn.
Many of the fruits and vegetables the colonists found, like corn, were native; others, such as figs, lemons, limes, and oranges, had been planted earlier by the Spanish;38 and others still—like the apple—they brought themselves. The first apple seeds arrived39 in the colonies on the Mayflower in 1620, where they would prosper more in a generation than they had in the entirety of apple history. And not because of Johnny Appleseed. Sure, there was a guy named John Chapman, born 1774, who traveled west from Massachusetts planting apple seeds, and his personal impact was significant. But everyone in the colonies was Johnny Appleseed—and they had more than a century’s head start on the actual Johnny. If you were a landowner in the New World, you planted apple trees, and if you were a landowner in Virginia40 or some parts of Ohio,41 this was actually a legal requirement. (In chapter 10, we’ll read how potatoes were similarly subsidized in Europe by threatening citizens with forty lashes or having their ears cut off for refusing to plant them.)
So by the late 1700s, the colonies were growing more apples, and apples of higher quality, than anywhere else in the world and shipping them overseas on a massive scale, providing much of the supply throughout Europe.42 And they weren’t just better but more diverse. Like the colonists themselves, they’d been shaped and transformed by the New World: its soil, its climate, its untamed wilds, and its geographic diversity.
Before 1620, there were no apples in the New World, barring inedible crabapples, and only somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy varieties cataloged in England.43 And thirty-six of those varieties44 had likely been around since the first century, having been cataloged by Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome. So between the years 55 and 1620, there were roughly thirty-four new types of apples documented in Europe. But the colonies gave birth to some seventeen thousand new varieties,45 not including the countless experiments that weren’t particularly appealing or worth cataloging.
Initially, this was due largely to the demand for hard apple cider, which served as not just the national beverage of the colonies but also as a currency for barter,46 the average colonial family generally consuming a few hundred gallons47 of it per year. However, apple pies quickly became a colonial staple, particularly in New England, where the growing season was so short and the winters so long that many fruits were sugared and preserved48 for winter rather than eaten fresh. The fibrous apple held up much better to this than other fruits; whereas softer fruits like raspberries and strawberries lent themselves more to soft jams and pastes, apples could easily be dried and reconstituted months later for pie filling.
So pies, long before Americans invented the McDonald’s drive-through*49 and TV dinners, were the paramount of convenience—well suited to the get-up-and-go lifestyle in the colonies, where you didn’t have servants to cook for you and do your dishes.
“The great beauty of an apple pie breakfast,50 aside from its power to generate indigestion,” writes R. K. Munkittrick in 1891, “lies in the fact that it doesn’t leave behind it a number of dishes thickly incrusted with ham grease to be cracked with a hammer or melted off over a candle.”
Pies were everything that tea wasn’t: hearty, available on demand, suited to travel, untamed, utilitarian, and unpretentious. They kept well, being sealed off from air and preserved with sugar; traveled well, being protected by a crust; and could easily be baked ahead and grabbed in the morning, so they met the demand for convenient, on-the-go meals Americans would become known for. During a time when the British were becoming increasingly proper, placing emphasis on decorum, etiquette, and social hierarchy (one of the reasons tea became popular51 in Great Britain was that coffeehouses were restricted to men), America’s humble pie showed the world a new form of liberty and freedom, unencumbered by pomp and circumstance: a world without limits, wherein women could drink not only coffee for breakfast but hard cider or melted bear fat.
“The pie is an English tradition,”52 writes Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, “which, planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie, but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock, evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses.”
Among those adaptations was the transformation of pie’s crust; you see, despite there being an abundance of birds and berries, wheat was initially scarce in the colonies,53 particularly in New England, and this forced colonists to literally stretch their crust until it became flaky and thin—making American crusts not just more edible but also more appetizing.
In other words, colonists elevated and transformed pie to the point that it became not just “a great American institution”54 but “the great American institution.”*55
Writes Charles Dudley Warner in 187256, pie was so ubiquitous in the colonies that its absence would have been more noticeable than a scarcity of Bibles.
“This country was founded57 by men who had pie for breakfast, pie for dinner, pie for supper; in addition they usually had a slice or so before going to bed at night,” reads a 1922 editorial in The Nation. “The only time they did not eat pie was when they were asleep, at work, or in church.”
The author then goes on to blame the corruption of American youth on the invention of marshmallow nut sundaes and banana splits and to suggest Lincoln could never have freed the slaves if it weren’t for his habitual indulgence in pie—this from a paper founded to “wage war upon the vices58 of violence, exaggeration and misrepresentation” in the media.
Meanwhile, the English continued to eat beans on toast for breakfast, stuff their pies with pigeon’s blood, and in general treat pie like a second-class citizen; and while American doctors and journalists hailed pie as a cure-all and the elixir of life, the English condemned it as a social disease, declaring, “The present civil strife59 in America is to be looked upon as a hideous nightmare, produced by half a century’s indulgence of an unhallowed appetite for pie.” Again, this is from a medical journal.
In 1865, British journalist George Augustus Sala wrote60 in his diary of America that “the real social curse of the Atlantic States is Pie,” “that an unholy appetite for Pie works untold woes,” and that “the Pie fiend reigns supreme.”
“The sallow faces, the shrunken forms, the sunken eyes, the morose looks, the tetchy temperament of the Northerners,” he writes, “are attributable not half so much to iced water, candies, tough beefsteaks, tight lacing, and tobacco-chewing, as to unbridled indulgence in Pie.”
He went on like this for four pages, later accusing American girls of taking pies to bed with them. The bastard.
Meanwhile, Rudyard Kipling, the British author of The Jungle Book who moved to Vermont in the late 1800s, called New England “the Great Pie Belt”61 and questioned the “moral and physical condition of a people which eats pie for breakfast, pie for dinner, pie for supper.”
Americans, of course, fired back.
In 1884, the New York Times published a biting parody in response to British criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s habit of eating pie for breakfast:
An indiscreet and perhaps malevolent62 person who once breakfasted with the late Ralph Waldo Emerson has revealed the fact that Mr. Emerson was accustomed to eat pie at breakfast. This revelation has naturally caused a very painful sensation, and not a few persons who had hitherto admired what they conceived to be the philosophical ideas expressed in Mr. Emerson’s writings have suddenly discovered that Mr. Emerson was not a philosopher and that his writings are filled with the vagueness that characterizes a mind warped and weakened by pie.
After warning readers that eating pie might cause them to compose poetry, attend prestigious schools, and gaze silently at the moon, the authors went on to suggest that “no pie shall be eaten until it has been thoroughly disinfected by prolonged immersion in a bath composed of carbolic acid, Worcestershire sauce, and permanganate of Sulphur” to avoid any “danger of increasing the flood of poetry, philosophy, and generally misery which has hitherto devastated so large a part of our country.”
And this back-and-forth continued for quite some time; eighteen years later, the Times was still declaring pie “the food of the heroic,”63 boasting that “No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished,” and calling it “a significant historical fact that England’s glory was greatest in the days when her gallant sons ate pie” and that such glory and greatness had long since crumbled.
During an 1889 debate on the national flower64, a Milwaukee journalist even suggested that the United States abandon its search for a symbolic flower and look instead to apple pie—it being more substantial and indicative of American life than a flimsy plant:
What’s the matter with the apple pie as a national emblem? The apple pie grows in every section of our beloved country, varying in thickness and toughness of crust, it is true, but always characteristically American. In the homes of New England, in the smack-houses of the South, on the lunch counters of the North, at the wayside stations of the towering Rockies—everywhere in this vast country the flaky or leathery crusts inclose the spiced fruit of the apple tree. Every true American eats apple pie. It is substantial, it is satisfying, it is hard to digest. And therefore it is no light and trifling symbol of the solid, satisfying and tenacious life of America.
That foreigners mocked America’s apple pie was another key selling point:
Another thing in favor of the apple pie as a national emblem is that it is hated, reviled and feared by foreigners, just as our great Republic has been. Like our free institutions, the apple pie has held its own against all the world. The French pate, the German coffee-cake, the English tart, the Scotch oat-cake, have all been offered as substitutes, but on every loyal table the apple pie holds its place of honor.
The author then closes by suggesting:
We should go further than to make the apple pie the national flower; we should embody in the Constitution of the United States a requirement that no foreign immigrant should receive his final papers of naturalization until he should eat an apple pie in the presence of the Court.
And maybe they were right. The search for a national flower would last another ninety-seven years until the Reagan administration finally settled65 on the rose in 1986 and include many front-runners most Americans had never heard of, like goldenrod and arbutus66. And what, really, has the rose done for America? The American colonies didn’t survive on rose water. American soldiers weren’t substantially taller than the British67 during the Revolution because they ate roses for breakfast.* American pioneers didn’t ride west with roses in their bags. The majority of roses aren’t even grown in America68 but in countries like Colombia or Ecuador, where they’re often the product of child labor and banned pesticides.*
In fact, apple pie might have made a decent national bird, too. Benjamin Franklin would have been on board with this, having imported American apples by the barrel69 while living in London; introduced the English to the Newtown Pippin70, a variety that would singlehandedly convince the queen to lift the tariff on American apples; and, in a 1784 letter, criticized the bald eagle for being lazy and immoral:
For my own part71 I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character; he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labor of the fishing-hawk; and, when that diligent bird has at length taken a fish, and is bearing it to his nest for the support of his mate and young ones, the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him. . . . Besides, he is a rank coward; the little kingbird, not bigger than a sparrow, attacks him boldly and drives him out of the district.
Franklin suggested the turkey as an alternative to the eagle but surely would have understood the repercussions of its being named after another country*72 and nearly wiped out by American colonists. (Try to recall the last time you saw a flock of five hundred turkeys running wild.)
Apples, meanwhile, are inherently diverse. They can be white or brown, pink or yellow, red or green; mixed or speckled, streaked or russeted; they can be fat, round, or pear-shaped; coarse or chalky; sweet, sour, or bitter; they can be English or Swiss, German or French; poisonous or forbidden. Add them to pie, and they become both sponge and catalyst.
“Do not suppose that we limit the apple-pie 73to the kinds and methods enumerated,” writes Henry Ward Beecher in 1862. “Its capacity in variation is endless, and every diversity discovers some new charm or flavour. It will accept almost every flavour of every spice.”
Perhaps most poignantly, the apple itself, like the colonists who planted it, refuses to be wrangled. “Sown by chance,74 or even sown intentionally,” writes Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, “apple trees almost always revert to the wild form instead of breeding true to the mother tree.”
One could certainly say the same about early colonists—and the country they colonized.
Sure, pie is immoderate, overindulgent, unrefined, and potentially inflammatory, but so is America; so were Searle and Emerson and that guy who drank a quart of rendered bear fat without vomiting; so are free speech, New England winters, and Fourth of July cookouts; so was declaring independence, dumping shiploads of tea into Boston Harbor, and fishing uncharted waters with frying pans in pursuit of the sweet, if sometimes excessive, taste of liberty.