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In cooking, an apple pie is a fruit pie (or tart) in which the principal filling ingredient is apples (Cooking Apples). Pastry is generally used top-and-bottom, making a double-crust pie, the upper crust of which may be 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

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.

A traditional way to serve apple pie, particularly in Yorkshire, is with cheese. This adds a deep and rich flavor. This is commonly a hard crumbly cheese such as Cheshire when served separately or Cheddar when cooked as a layer within the pie.

In Commonwealth 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.

Cane sugar imported from Egypt was not widely available in fourteenth-century England, where it cost between one and two shillings a pound — one source claims that this is roughly the equivalent of US$100 per kg in today's prices).

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.

Dutch style

Dutch apple pie (appeltaart or appelgebak) recipes go back a long way. Dutch recipes typically also call for flavourings such as cinnamon and lemon juice to be added, and Dutch apple pies are usually decorated in a lattice style. Dutch apple pies contain the regular ingredients plus others including raisins and icing.

Apple pie in American culture

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, as apples do not come true from seeds. 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 discovery of America, "as American as apple pie" is a common saying in the United States, meaning "typically American". The dish was also commemorated in the phrase "for mom and apple pie" - supposedly the stock answer of soldiers in WWII, whenever journalists asked why they were going to war.

Advertisers exploited the patriotic connection in the 1970s with the TV 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.

An apple pie was also the subject of a running gag throughout the movie American Pie, where Jason Biggs' character masturbates with a "homemade American apple pie".

Other meanings of "Apple pie"

• An "apple-pie bed" is one which has been short-sheeted as a prank. May be so-called because the sheets are doubled over "like the cover of an apple turnover."
• "Apple-pie order" meaning to be tidy and in good order, may not refer to the pastry at all, but may be a juncture loss of the French nappes pliées, "neatly folded linen."

See also

• Tarte Tatin, a French variant on apple pie
• Apfelstrudel or Apple Strudel, an Austrian pie-like dish made with dough, apples, sugar and spices.
• Dutch apple pie
• apple cobbler

References

1. [http://www.sucrose.com/lhist.html
2. http://www.recipesource.com/special-diets/diabetic/pies/apple-pie2.html
3. http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=american*1+0&dict=I
4. http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=apple-pie%20bed
5. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/apple-pie%20order

External links

• Food Timeline history Notes: Apple Pie
• Apple Pie Nutritional Information
• A Apple Pie, by Kate Greenaway, 1886. Woodblock printed children's book, based on a much earlier rhyme; from Project Gutenberg

• American pies
• British pies
• Dutch cuisine
• Sweet pies
• Apple products
• English cuisine