Pie-A sweet or savory dish made with a crust and filling (such as fruit, pudding, meat or vegetable). Pies can have bottom crusts only, or top and bottom crusts or, as with deep-dish pies, only a top crust. Sweet pies are generally served as dessert and savory pies as the main course or appetizer. Crusts can be made of a variety of mixtures including short crust pastry, puff pastry, cookie crumbs, meringue and even, as with Shepard's pie, mashed potatoes.
Culinary Quote Du Jour-
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe". ~Carl Sagan
The Greeks were thought to have invented the first pie; pastry, flour, water and fat. In the first century A.D. Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 B.C.) was a Roman politican. His treatise on agriculture, De Agricultura or De Re Rustica, is the only work by him that has been preserved. He wrote about farming, wine making, and cooking among other things. This is his recipe for libum, the small sweet cheese pie often given as a temple offering, the first ever:
Libum to be made as follows: 2 pounds cheese well crushed in a mortar; when it is well crushed, add in 1 pound bread-wheat flour or, if you want it to be lighter, just 1/2 a pound, to be mixed with the cheese. Add one egg and mix all together well. Make a loaf of this, with the leaves under it, and cook slowly in a hot fire under a brick.
Small cheese pies were served to victorious athletes during the first Olympic games held in 776 B.C. on the Isle of Delos. The Greeks in 1000 A.D. taught the Romans of this invention and this was a great way to preserve and prepare meat for travel, and conquering I presume?
The Romans spread the concept of pies through out Great Britain and Western Europe.
There are many favorite pies from around the world, Cornish pies that are the working meal of Welsh miners, empanadas are Latin America's contribution, the French tarte tatin an upside down fruit pie as well as Dutch apple pie the mother of all american apple pies.
No place on earth has embraced the pie like American, apple specifically. Although apple pies have been eaten since long before the European colonisation of the Americas, "as American as apple pie" is a saying in the United States, meaning "typically American". In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity and national pride. A newspaper article published in 1902 declared that “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.” 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. An idea and way of life worth fighting for.
Pie has come to define certain regions of the United States as well; Key Lime pie in Florida, Pecan and sweet potato in the southern states, mud pie from Mississippi and Pumpkin for the north east. Alton Brown once said, “Pie is the culinary currency of the Midwest. You know you've moved into the Midwest when you start getting really good pie.”. I think if Marie Antoinette had said let them eat pie she would have fared better!
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