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An apple pie is a fruit pie (or tart) in which the principal filling ingredient
is apples. It is sometimes served with whipped cream or ice cream on top. Pastry
is generally used top-and-bottom, making a double-crust pie, the upper crust of
which may be a disk shaped crust or a pastry lattice woven of strips; exceptions
are deep-dish apple pie with a top crust only, and open-face Tarte Tatin.
Ingredients
Cooking apples (culinary apples, colloquially cookers), such as the Bramley or
Granny Smith, are crisp and acidic. The fruit for the pie can be fresh, canned,
or reconstituted from dried apples. This affects the final texture, and the
length of cooking time required; whether it has an effect on the flavour of the
pie is a matter of opinion. Dried or preserved apples were originally
substituted only at times when fresh fruit was unavailable.
The English pudding
"For to Make Tartys in Applis", 18th century print of a 14th century recipe
English apple pie recipes go back to the time of Chaucer. The 1381 recipe (see
illustration at right) lists the ingredients as good apples, good spices, figs,
raisins and pears. The cofyn of the recipe is a casing of pastry. Saffron is
used for colouring the pie filling.
In English speaking countries, apple pie is a dessert of enduring popularity,
eaten hot or cold, on its own or with ice cream, double cream, or custard.
Absence of sugar in early English recipe
Most modern recipes for apple pie require an ounce or two of sugar, but the
earliest recipe does not. There are two possible reasons.
Sugarcane imported from Egypt was not widely available in 14th century England,
where it cost between one and two shillings per pound — this is roughly the
equivalent of US$100 per kg (about US$50 per pound) in today's prices.[1]
The absence of sugar in the recipe may instead indicate that, because refined
sugar was a recent introduction from the Orient, the medieval English did not
have quite as sweet a tooth as their descendants. Honey, which was many times
cheaper, is also absent from the recipe, and the "good spices" and saffron, all
imported, were no less expensive and difficult to obtain than refined sugar.
Despite the expense, refined sugar did appear much more often in published
recipes of the time than honey, suggesting that it was not considered
prohibitively expensive. With the exception of apples and pears, all the
ingredients in the filling probably had to be imported. And perhaps, as in some
modern "sugar-free" recipes, the juice of the pears was intended to sweeten the
pie.
In the English colonies the apple pie had to wait for carefully planted pips,
brought in barrels across the Atlantic, to become fruit-bearing apple trees, to
be selected for their cooking qualities. In the meantime, the colonists were
more likely to make their pies, or "pasties", of meat rather than of fruit; and
the main use for apples, once they were available, was in cider. But there are
American apple-pie recipes, both manuscript and printed, from the eighteenth
century, and it has since become a very popular dessert.
A mock apple pie made from crackers was apparently invented by pioneers on the
move during the nineteenth century who were bereft of apples. In the 1930s, and
for many years afterwards, Ritz Crackers promoted a recipe for mock apple pie
using its product, along with sugar and various spices.
Although apple pies have been eaten since long before the European colonization
of the Americas, "as American as apple pie" is a saying in the United States,
meaning "typically American".[2] The dish was also commemorated in the phrase
"for Mom and apple pie" - supposedly the stock answer of American soldiers in
World War II, whenever journalists asked why they were going to war.[3]
Advertisers exploited the patriotic connection in the 1970s with the commercial
jingle "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet". There are claims that the
Apple Marketing Board of New York State used such slogans as "An apple a day
keeps the doctor away" and "as American as apple pie!", and thus "was able to
successfully 'rehabilitate' the apple as a popular comestible" in the early
twentieth century when prohibition outlawed the production of cider.
The unincorporated community of Pie Town, New Mexico is named in honor of the
apple pie.
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