A pie, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a dish composed of fruit, meat, cheese, or other ingredients baked over, under, or surrounded by a crust of pastry or other dough.” Within this definition simmer sweet and savory flavors that bubble up and practically ooze over its edge. It evokes a cherry pie hot from the oven, its crust flaky, its sugary lattice top golden-brown, its filling bursting with cherries, a work of culinary art begging to be paired with vanilla ice cream.
Or perhaps the definition recalls the cherry pie’s savory sibling: quiche. Once again, a flaky crust, but this time one brimming with tender mushrooms, caramelized onions, zesty sausage, and perfectly set eggs, permeated wholly with Swiss cheese. The savory sibling boasts of its own successes, but when it comes to pie, the sweet varieties array themselves in a nearly endless offering.
So many things to put in a pie! Sprinkle a crust with peanut butter crumbs—a mixture of peanut butter and powdered sugar—fill the pie with vanilla pudding and top it with Cool Whip and more crumbs to make a peanut butter pie. Or perhaps you’re dreaming of chocolate pie instead. All you need is a pie crust, chocolate pudding, and Cool Whip. You can even try a mix-and-match pie: sprinkle peanut butter crumbs over a crust, fill the pie with chocolate pudding, heap on the Cool Whip, garnish the pie with more peanut butter crumbs, and voilà! a chocolate peanut butter pie. If your sweet tooth begs for some balance, fill the pie crust partway with vanilla pudding and top it with a thick layer of raspberry filling for a beautiful pairing of the sweet and the tart.
Setting aside the cream pies, consider the possibilities for fruit pies. Blackberry. Blueberry. Strawberry. (Really, any berry will do.) Apple. Cherry. Grape. Peach. Rhubarb. Lemon pie and key lime pie probably fall in this category too, although their filling is pudding-based, unlike the fresh or frozen fruit that fills most other fruit pies.
Chefs often top fruit pies with crumbs made of flour, oatmeal, brown sugar, and butter, or they roll out a second crust to cover the pie. The secret to a golden, mouthwatering top crust is to rub cream or egg white over it and sprinkle on sugar before popping it into the oven.
Some pies seem meant for a certain season: fresh strawberry pie in spring, pumpkin and pecan pies in fall. Other pies grow out of a certain culture: mincemeat pie from the British, and shoofly pie from the Amish. Mincemeat pie is typically made of beef, beef suet, raisins, currants, apples, citrus peel, and brandy, along with brown sugar and spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Shoofly pie, on the other hand, is known for its rich molasses filling, topped with sweet crumbs.
A milder version of shoofly pie is vanilla crumb pie, also topped with sweet crumbs, but with a filling made of brown sugar and corn syrup instead of molasses. Vanilla crumb pie has often shown up at potlucks at my church, thanks to the pie-making skills of Shirley Miller.
Miller, who grew up in Delaware, baked vanilla crumb pies with her mom for their school’s annual benefit auction. After Miller married and moved to Virginia, she began taking her pies to family gatherings and church dinners. “Once people knew what they tasted like,” she said, “they would ask for them.” She often brought four or five vanilla crumb pies to a church potluck, and we all knew we had to hustle to the dessert table if we wanted to snag a slice of her famous pie.
Vanilla crumb pies and other dessert pies have been around only for the last several hundred years. While early versions of pie can be traced back to Egyptian, Greek, and Roman history, even medieval European pies hardly match our modern expectations. The crusts were tough rather than flaky and not actually meant to be eaten. Their main purpose was to hold filling, often some type of meat.
Katura Troyer, one of my pie-baking friends, regards a flaky crust as essential to a good pie. While making a good crust requires skill, she enjoys the challenge. Her secrets to a perfect pie crust include using ice water in the dough and not overmixing things. She says that a tough pie crust comes from not using enough shortening. “You have to get the proportions right,” she says.
Apparently, this point was lost to medieval cooks.
What medieval cooks did enjoy was creating surprise pies for entertainment. According to Janet Clarkson in “Pie: A Global History,” these chefs made large, deep pie crusts with a small hole in the bottom and another crust on top that formed a lid over the hollow pie. After the crust was baked, they would slip live birds in through the hole.
The pie would then be set on the table and either cut or uncovered, just like the nursery rhyme says: “Sing a song of sixpence a pocket full of rye, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing; wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?”
Other surprises inside a pie might include frogs, rabbits, or even a dwarf. Jeffrey Hudson, a famous English dwarf, stood at only 18 inches tall at age seven when he was presented to Queen Henrietta Maria in a pie.
Dessert pies, as we know them today (no entertaining surprises inside), are essentially American. When English colonists crossed the ocean to the New World, they brought their pie recipes with them, but they soon began baking pies with berries and fruits that indigenous people showed them. After processed sugar became commonplace and affordable for American cooks, they rolled out one dessert pie after the next.
Not only has pie become firmly established in the culinary landscape, but it has also become established in numerous idioms. For example, “as American as apple pie” means that something is typically American. This idiom gained popularity in World War II, although it probably originated earlier. During World War II, American soldiers liked to say they had enlisted to fight “for mom and apple pie.”
The idiom “pie in the sky” originated in the United States with Joe Hill, who criticized the Salvation Army for not meeting the material needs of the poor but promising them heavenly rewards if they converted to Christianity. In 1911, Hill wrote a parody of the hymn “In the Sweet By-and-By,” writing in one line, “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” We use this idiom today to describe expectations or prospects that are pleasant but unrealistic.
Another pie-related idiom is to “eat humble pie.” In the 1640s, poor people ate umble pie— a pie made from the umbles (heart, liver, and entrails, or what we might call offal) of an animal, especially a deer. Since umble sounds like humble, by 1830 we had the idiom “eat humble pie.” The wordplay points to the humble nature of an umble pie. When someone admits to being wrong or accepts defeat, it’s like eating umbles rather than an animal’s tastier parts.
Other common pie idioms include “easy as pie” (very easy), “slice of the pie” (a portion of the benefits), and “a finger in every pie” (to have an interest or share in many different things).
For most people, making pie is not “as easy as pie,” especially not mixing the pie dough and rolling it out. One convenient shortcut is to buy premade crusts, especially from a brand like Walnut Creek Foods, whose pie crusts are nearly indistinguishable from homemade ones. My local bakery, Miller’s Bake Shoppe, offers customers frozen, unbaked pies. This lets the bakery keep a finger in the pie, even as their customers delight in the delectable aromas of a fruit pie baking at home.
So many kinds of pie, so little time to try them all! Whether the pie is packed with summer-fresh peaches or syrupy pecans, pour yourself a cup of coffee, scoop a generous share of ice cream, and savor a slice of the pie.