[B]lessed be the unknown
person who invented the apple-pie! Did I know where the grave of that person
was, methinks I would make a devout pilgrimage thither, and rear a monument
over it that should mark the spot to the latest generations. Of all pies, of every name, the apple-pie is
easily the first and chief.
Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s brother, and famed American clergyman, social reformer and
speaker)
Apple Pie
has been as “American as Apple Pie” for well over a century.
The expression has appeared in that form
since at least 1910; and the sentiment dates back to at least the 1860s.
Apple Pie as a Symbol of America
In 1889, the
United States was engaged in a fierce debate; a struggle for the soul of the
country; an attempt to establish a lasting symbol of American greatness; an
effort to answer the burning question of the day – what should be the National
Flower?
The idea,
first broached at a florists’ convention, was to adopt a flower as the national
flower, “as the rose is of England and the lily is of France.” The National Botanical Garden favored the
sunflower, the Agricultural Department voted for the golden-rod, and the White
House Conservatories nominated the daisy. Hundreds of newspaper editorials
churned through dozens of suggestions, none of which had universal appeal;
cotton blossom (too regional), apple blossom (not really indigenous), clover (essentially
the same as a Shamrock). What to do?
Some genius
in Wisconsin had a better idea – the “Apple Pie.”
The
National Emblem
What
is the Matter with the American Apple Pie?
[From
the Milwaukee Sentinel.]
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 a trifling
symbol of the solid, satisfying and tenacious life of America.
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 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.
Apple pie is fit for
all. The sage and saint of Concord,
Emerson, poet and philosopher, fed his mouse on pie three times a day; the
business man rushes to the lunch counter for a piece of apple pie and a glass
of milk; the laborer draws his piece of pie from his dinner pail as the
crowning luxury of his meal. The hope of
the office-seeker is a salary that will give him pie seven days a week.
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. The
most distinctively American flower is the apple pie, not excepting the
doughnut.
Sacramento Daily Record-Union
(California), July 13, 1889, page 8.
This
editorial was not alone (if at all) responsible for elevating the Apple Pie to
its status as a Symbol of America. The apple
pie was considered distinctively American long before the great-National Flower
Debate of 1889.
In 1875, as
the American Centennial celebration neared, one observer of pop-culture predicted
the typical Americans of the future, during the American Bi-Centennial, would
still be eating Apple Pie:
No good thing is destined
to moderate use; so that the second centennial will probably see the typical American fiercely attacking a frightful triangle of apple pie, and washing it down
with constant deluges from a glass crammed with ice and prospective
stomach-ache.
The Daily Phoenix (Columbia, South
Carolina), July 8, 1875, page 2.
An American (Apple Pie) in Paris
In the
1860s, homesick Americans in Europe could get a taste of American Apple Pie in
Paris:
The bill of fare in a
Paris restaurant gives the following list of “American
specialties”: –
“Hot corn bread, stewed
oysters, fried do., pickled do., oyster fritters, gingerbread, buckwheat cakes,
apple dumplings, apple pie, mince pie, lemon
pie, pumpkin pie, and all kinds of American pastry.
The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer (West
Virginia), April 21, 1866, page 1.
In the late-1870s,
it was fashionable among certain classes to denounce pie, as something low-class;
but those same critics might nevertheless stop by for an American apple pie in
Paris:
A great many people think
it savors of a life abroad to speak with horror of pie, although they were very
likely the foremost of the Americans in Paris who used to speak with more
enthusiasm of the America pie at Madame Busque’s
than of the Venus of Milo.
Charles
Dudley Warner, Backlog Studies,
Boston, Osgood, 1878.
Standard European
menus, it seems, did not satisfy the standard American palate:
Nothing in European
dinners can compare with the American custards, puddings, and pies. We are accused as a nation of having eaten
too many sweets, and of having ruined our teeth thereby; but who that has
languished in England over the insipid desserts at hotels, and the
tooth-sharpeners called “sweets,” meaning tarts as sour as an east wind, has
not sighed for an American pie? In Paris
the cakes are pretty to look at, but oh, how they break their promise when you
eat them! Nothing but sweetened white of egg.
One thing they surpass us in, - omelette soufflé; and gateau St. Honore
is good, but with that word of praise we dismiss the great French nation. . . .
But oh! There is “something
more exquisite still,” and that is an apple pie.
Apple Pie.
All new dishes fade, the
newest oft the fleetest;
Of all pies ever made, the
apple’s still the sweetest.
Cut and come again, the
syrup upward springing,
While life and taste
remain, to thee my heart is clining.
Who a pie would make,
first his apple slices,
Then he ought to take some
cloves and best of spices,
Grate some lemon rind,
butter add discreetly,
Then some sugar mix, but
mine, - the pie not make too sweetly,
If a cook of taste be
competent to make it,
In the finest paste he
will enclose and bake it.”
During years of foreign
travel I have never met a dish so perfect as the
American apple pie can be, with cream.
M. E. W.
Wherwood, The Art of Entertaining,
New York, Dodd, Mead and Company, 1892.
The word got
out; the Queen of England wanted a taste:
. . . and
Rudyard Kipling loved American Apple Pie so much that his American wife bought a
high-tech American rolling pin:
 |
| The Brownsville Daily Herald (Texas), October 14, 1903, page 4. | | |
. . . and the Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe (who first turned his nose up at the pie) was a convert:
 |
| Evening Star (Washington DC), September 17, 1904. |
As American as Apple Pie
The earliest
example of the expression, “as American as Apple Pie,” that I could find is
from 1910; in a review of Winchell Smith’s play, Bobby Burnit:
Bobby Burnit. By Winchell
Smith
For a long time Mr. George
Randolph Chester has been delighting the readers of the Saturday Evening Post
with the type of young American who regards life as a holiday affair until he
gets to the end of his string, but who then braces up and proves himself a
great deal of a man. The latest of these
creations is “Bobby Burnit” and Mr. Winchell Smith has made a play out of his
adventures . . . . [I]t is full of
satisfying humor without a dull spot and is as American
as apple pie.
Metropolitan Magazine, Volume 33, Number
1, October 1910.
The
expression appears in print numerous times throughout the 1920s; the earliest
in March 1920. A case-study of how the town of Chester,
Pennsylvania successfully assimilated foreign-born workers into the community during
a World War I surge in wartime production, suggested one method of Americanizing
the great unwashed – let them take showers, “it’s as American as Apple Pie”:
Baths are as
characteristically American as apple pie.
Chester started Americanizing its foreigners by letting them use the shower
baths in the school houses.
Another early
example of the expression in print noted that early German successes on the
battlefield in World War I had been the result of American tactics:
It is rather interesting
to know that something of the perfection of the German mobilization and of the
swift smash through Belgium and northern France was due to the use the Germans
made of ideas as American as apple pie.
The Sun and The New York Herald, April
4, 1920, page 88.
[i]
The
expression may have gained steam during World War I; perhaps inspired by the homesick
nostalgia of American troops serving
“Over There”:
Out of the ruck and din of war has come the news that the apple pie is coming into its own and I am glad.
Today, the old apple pie, the favorite of my boyhood and your boyhood and girlhood, is being acclaimed as the king of pastry in foreign lands as well as the United States. A king has tasted of it and approved; it is now known to be the favorite pastry of Gen. Pershing, commander of the American expeditionary forces; soldiers at the front are being supplied with it by Salvation Army lassies, and here at home it is being praised by returning soldiers as one of the staffs of life of the battlefield. Of recent date I heard it praised in a street speech and since I have read of its European triumph in newspapers and magazines.
The Sun and The New York Herald, April
4, 1920, page 88.
[i]
Once again, you could get a slice
of American Apple Pie in Paris:
Harrisburg Telegraph (Pennsylvania),
September 13, 1918, page 12.
There is no spot in Paris
where the men in olive drab find more real enjoyment than in this clubhouse
[(the Y. M. C. A.)]. To begin with, it
is one of the few places where it is possible to get a piece of genuine American pie, the real New England national dish.
France has many culinary
attainments to her credit, but up to date she has not succeeded in achieving an
American pie. The soldiers always weep
for joy when they first encounter this homely article of food.
Harrisburg Telegraph (Pennsylvania), September
13, 1918, page 12.
Theodore
Roosevelt’s daughter-in-law is said to have had a hand in bringing the apple
pie to the Paris Y. M. C. A.:
Apple pie, such
as mother made, was the attraction that drew a hungry lot of young
Americans in uniform to the canteen of the Y. M. C. A. one day last week. . . .
The American women who every afternoon
devote themselves to serving the boys in uniform decided that peach ice cream,
raspberry water ice, cakes of all descriptions and richness, soft drinks of
many flavors – some quite unexpected – did not quite make the boys feel at
home. What was lacking? Mrs. Theodore
Roosevelt, Jr., who is one of the most active waitresses at the canteen,
searched for the answer. Why pie, of course!
But this is Paris, where
pie is unknown, that is to say real pie.
One can buy the most delicious fruit tarts, but they have no upper
crust, and who ever heard of mother baking a pie with only a lower crust? The bakers and confectioners who supplied the
cakes and tarts decided to experiment, but at a pension frequented by Americans
the “jewel of a cook” was found. Assisted
by some of the canteen workers, she baked the pies in the morning; that
afternoon she was an Immortal, so said the American boys who ate them.
The Sun (New York), October 17, 1917,
page 14.
And, it wasn't just in Paris; the soldiers could also get Apple Pie (and doughnuts) at the front:
 |
| New York Tribune, May 18, 1918, page 3. |
Similar
stories played themselves out in other locations:
 |
| Harrisburg Telegraph, July 1, 1918, page 8. |
And, it
wasn’t just Americans overseas who saw apple pies as something distinctively
American; foreigners visiting the United States thought so too:
M. Edwards, of
Johannesburg, South Africa, who dined often and well at the Hotel Belleclaire
during his stay in New York, was so impressed with our Apple Pie that when he
sailed for home on the steamship “City of Calcutta” Friday, August 17, he took
with him two Belleclaire Apple Pies, calculating that they would last him about
five days, on the basis of eating three pieces a day.
Mr. Edwards is some apple
pie eater! He thinks our Apple Pie is
the greatest dish he ever ate. He told
us before sailing “Your Apple Pie almost persuadeth me
to become an American.”
New York Tribune, September 2, 1917,
page 54.
American Pies
In 1917,
pie, generally, was considered “The National Dish,” and Apple Pies, in
particular, had long been the king of American pies:
The National Dish.
The pie holds the center
of the American table. Its priceless
influence on the national life cannot be measured. It has sustained us through wars, politics,
administrations, plague and panic. . . . It has gladdened every feast. Who can count the meals that have been
brightened by the pie!
Evening Star, January 20, 1917, page 6.
Chicago’s Mouth for Pie.
According to the
statistical fiend Chicago eats 300,000 pies a day . . . . There are nineteen standard kinds of pie, but
apple takes the cake. . . . Americans
eat more pie than foreigners, but the men from New England take the lead in
eating pie. Pie and milk is their
favorite lunch.
The Daily Astorian (Astor, Oregon),
December 3, 1885, page 1.
A Pie Factory.
Popularity of a
Distinctively American Pastry.
Three Hundred Thousand
Gothamites Addicted to Its Daily Use.
The apples are the staple
of most of the factory-made pies . . . .
No other country has the
same advantages as America in this respect, and the “tarts” of England and
pastries of France have never been able to rival the popular and economical
qualities of the American pie. – New York
Graphic.
The Abbeville Press and Banner
(Abbeville, South Carolina), March 7, 1888, page 3.
Why is Apple Pie “American”?
Long before
the United States existed, at least one British poet loved him some Apple pie –
or pye:
Apple Pye: A Poem, by Dr.
King
Of all the Delicates which
Britons try,
To please the Palate, or
delight the Eye;
Of all the several Kinds
of Sumptuous Fare;
There’s none that can with
Apple-Pye compare,
For costly Flavour, or
substantial Paste,
For outward Beauty, or for
inward Taste.
The Art of Dress. A Poem, London,
Printed for R. Burleigh, in Amen-Corner, 1717.
So what’s so
American about Apple Pies?
The popularity
of Apple Pie in the United States may be the result of several factors; sugar,
apples and crust.
The Untied States was
a major sugar producer, whereas Europe could only import their sugar.
Sugar may therefore have been cheaper, and
the pies sweeter.
Although apples were
not indigenous to North America, the earliest colonists brought apple seeds and
cuttings with them; and westward-travelling settlers brought apples and apple
trees with them.
Entrepreneurs like
Johnny Appleseed also spread the gospel of apples.
The United States is still the second largest
apple producer in the world, behind only China.
Finally, the popularity of Apple Pie in the United States may have benefitted
from good-old American ingenuity – a bottom crust. An informal
review of a representative sampling of several American and British cookbooks
from the first half of the nineteenth century reveals a marked contrast between
British “pies” and American “pies.”
British
cookbooks describe pies, including apple pies, in which the filling is placed
directly in an unlined pan and covered with a single, upper crust.
[ii] American cookbooks, on the other hand,
distinguish between “pies” and “pot pies.” In making “pies,” the pan is first
lined with a bottom crust, then filled and covered with an upper-crust; for “pot
pies,” like British “pies,” the filling is placed directly into the unlined pan
or “pot” and covered with a single, upper-crust.
[iii]
Whether these differences hold across
all early British cookbooks and all early American cookbooks may be answered
better by a culinary historian; but the first several of both types of cookbooks
I looked through were all in agreement. Two crusts - it's as American as Apple Pie; perhaps it's what makes Apple "Pies" American.
George Washington – Father of Our
Country – Father of Our Pie?
I cannot
tell a lie – George Washington is the Father of American Apple Pie. OK, it’s just a little fib; but this, perhaps
overly-patriotic account of the origin of American Apple Pie from the early
1900s credits Washington's cook with the innovation:
The
First Apple Pie
George Washington gave the
American colonies freedom and independence. . . . But George Washington’s
unknown cook first gave the world something in his own line that is still
peculiar to America – apple pie.
“Pie” almost anywhere in
the world but America, means a meat pie, even today. English cooks make what they call a “tart”
that is the nearest approach to the American pie, - a mess of fruit cooked in a
soup plate and covered with a thin crust, tender, but not crisp and
flakey. Even with the help of skilled
cooks, this “tart” is a long, long way from the culinary perfection of the
American pie.
It may seem like a pretty
farfetched claim to the credit of Washington’s camp cook but one of
Washington’s own letters makes mention of the experiment, and those familiar
with culinary history say that if the apple pie mentioned was not really the
very first apple pie ever made, it was close to it. In a letter to a friend, Washington says:
Of late he [(the cook)]
has had the surprising sagacity to discover that apples will make pies; and it
is a question, if, in the violence of his efforts we do not get one of the
apples instead of having both of beefsteak.
If the ladies can put up with such an entertainment, and will submit to
partake of it on plates, once tin but now iron (not become so by the labor of
scouring), I shall be happy to see them; and am, dear doctor, yours, etc. –
George Washington.”
The Minneapolis Journal, February 25,
1906, The Journal Junior, page 56.
It may not
be true, but the story at least reflects the perceived differences between
American Apple Pie and other pies of the world; and tries to tie the most
American pie to the most American hero.
I wonder whether George Washington could throw an Apple Pie across the
Potomac?
Abraham
Lincoln is also tied to Apple Pie lore.
In a
cooking video on
History.com’s
“Hungry History” series, a chef demonstrating how to bake an Apple Pie
claims that, “Historians believe that the phrase, ‘as American as Apple Pie,’
was coined by Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War.”
It is possible, I suppose, but it may just be
apocryphal.
Whether historians actually believe it or not another question.
Another
apocryphal Lincoln story suggests that when he greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe,
the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on her visit to the White House during the
Civil War, he asked her whether she was the woman who wrote the book that
started the war; which brings us back to Harriet's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, whose
words opened this piece. He wrote
lovingly of Apple Pie on several occasions, in words that may may reflect the mood of American public, in general, vis-a-vis pie; which could help explain how and why the Apple Pie is so revered:
[B]lessed be the unknown
person who invented the apple-pie! Did I know where the grave of that person
was, methinks I would make a devout pilgrimage thither, and rear a monument
over it that should mark the spot to the latest generations. Of all pies, of every name, the apple-pie is
easily the first and chief.[iv]
Apple-Pie should be eaten
while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of
candied juice along the edges (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its
own lips watered!), of a mild and modest warmth; the sugar suggesting jelly,
yet not jellied; the morsels of apple neither dissolved, nor yet in original
substance, but hanging, as it were, in a trance between the spirit and the
flesh of applehood.[v]
Not that apple is no longer
apple! It, too, is transformed; and the final pie, though born of apple, sugar,
butter, nutmeg, cinnamon, lemon, is unlike none of these, but the ideal of them
all, refined, purified, and by fire fixed in blissful perfection.[vi]
Or, maybe it just tastes good.
[ii]
John Simpson,
A Complete System of
Cookery on a Plan Entirely New, London, W. Steward, 1816; William
Kitchiner, The Cook’s Oracle, London, Cadell, 1827; Robert Huish,
The Female’s Friend, and General Domestic
Adviser, London, G. Virtue, 1837;
The
Young Cook’s Assistant, Being a Selection of Economical Receipts and
Directions, Adapted to the use of Families in the Middle Rank of Life, edited
by a Clergyman’s Daughter, London, John Johnstone, 1848.
[iii]
Elizabeth Putnam,
Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt
Book: and Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, Boston, Ticknor, Reed and Fields,
1850; E. A. Howland, The New England Economical Housekeeper, and Family Receipt
Book, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1845; H. L. Barnum,
Family Receipts, or Practical Guide for the Husbandman and Housewife,
Cincinnati, A. B. Roff, 1831.
[iv] Samuel
B. Halliday,
Henry Ward Beecher: A Sketch
of His Career, Hartford, Connecticut, American Publishing Company, 1887,
page 583.
[v] Eleanor
Maria (Easterbrook) Ames,
Beecher as a
Humorist, New York, Fords, Howard and Hulbert, 1887, page 28.
[vi] Proceedings of the Meeting of the New York
Horticultural Society, 1901, page 57.
