Are Apple Pies really "all-American"?

Question

I thought they were Dutch.....

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

There was a relatively brief period, the late 19th and early 20th century, a time which saw the birth of that figure of speech, when anything that was really good was claimed to be American without regard to the facts.

Of course, you know how different things are from that today. ;)

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

Very True! Thank you!

Answer 2

I thought Pizza originated in italy, but no, it's American.

Answer 3

Yeah they do sound like Dutch.

Answer 4

The colonist brought apple pies from England.

Answer 5

Of course not.

Originated in many European countries

Answer 6

"Apples" did not originate from America but apple pies did. The apple originated from Europe and England used apples in many recipes as early as the 14th century.

Answer 7

I don't know from where they derived. I do know this, bring it on. I love apple pies. Even when I am at McDonald's restaurants, I order the 2/$1.00 apple pies. They are so delicious. As for the hamburgers, I haven't eaten one in years. Now I am going to have to leave the Yahoo Answers! and find some apple pie. I wish you peace.

Answer 8

While apple pie may or may not have originated in the US, it was adopted on a very large scale. It became an American institution and the basis of the saying. However it is only recently that people have assumed that it means the pie was invented there. After all, pretty much anything that is all American was either borrowed from, or inspired by something from another country.

Answer 9

Recipes for apple pie (along with apples!) were brought to America by early European settlers. These recipes date back to Medieval times. Here is a sample from English cooking text circa 1381: For to Make Tartys in Applis. [NOTE: cofyn is a medieval word meaning pie crust!] (The recipe is located at the second source). About pie.

"The typical American pie made from uncooked apples, fat, sugar, and sweet spices mixed together and baked inside a closed pie shell descends from fifteenth-century English apple pies, which, while not quite the same, are similar enough that the relationship is unmistakable. By the end of the sixteenth century in England, apple pies were being made that are virtually identical to those made in America in the early twenty-first century. Apple pies came to America quite early. There are recipes for apple pie in both manuscript receipts and eighteenth-century English cookery books imported into the colonies."
---Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Andrew Smith editor [Oxford University Press:New York] 2004 (p. 43)

About apple pie , Alice Ross Journal of Antiques (includes notes on pie tins)

Most apple varieties originated in the Middle East. The fruit was introduced to Europe by the Roman legions. They were actively cultivated. Apples are considered one of America's symbols because they are prominently featured in recipes throughout our nation's history. About apples:

"The Romans introduced new economic plants. They had already developed several apple varieties, with fruits smaller than those of today but larger and sweeter than those borne by Britain's indigenous wild crabs...Their apple varieties included types for good keeping, and villa owers stored them spread out in rows in a dry, well-ventilated loft...Apples were sliced into two or three pieces with a red or bone knife (since metal stained the fruit), and were put to lie in the sun."(p. 325-6)..."One of the earliest named apples was the pearmain, recorded soon after 1200. The copstard, a very large apple, was popular from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. It was sold in the streets fo London by costermongers...By the fifteenth century pippins, pomewaters, bittersweets and blanderelles had become fashionable apple varieties. Several of the medieval applese were good keeping types; indeed, apples were preferred when they had been kept awhile and allowed to mellow." (p. 330-1),,,Apples were pulped in the mortar and then put into tarts." (p. 334)
---Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century, C. Anne Wilson [Academy Chicago:Chicago] 1991 (p. 325-6)

"Apple. There were no native American apples when the first settlers arrived on these shores..The first apple seeds were brought by the Pilgrims in 1620, and there were plantings in New Jersey as of 1632...In 1730 the first commercial apple nursery was opened on New York's Long Island, and by 1741 applese were being shipped to the West Indies. The proliferation of the fruit into the western territories came by the hand of John Chapman, affectionately known as Johnny Appleseed. Born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1774, Chapman left his father's carpentry shop to explore the new territories...Apples were introduced to the Northwest by Captain Aemilius Simmons, who planted seeds at Fort Vancouver in Washington in 1824..."
---The Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman:New York] 1999 (p. 8)

Source(s):

http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpies.htm…
http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/FoC160sm…

Answer 10

Lke everything, it's lost in history; I believe that the title comes from a period (mid-late19th century) where anything that was popular was seen to be all-American.

Answer 11

Samuel Sewall, distinguished Alumnus (1696) of Harvard College and citizen of Boston, went on a picnic expedition to Hog Island on October 1, 1697. There he dined on apple pie. He wrote in his diary, "Had first Butter, Honey, Curds and Cream. For Dinner, very good Rost Lamb, Turkey, Fowls, Applepy."

That is the first, but hardly the last, American mention of a dish whose patriotic symbolism is expressed in a 1984 book by Susan Purdy, As Easy as Pie: "This is It!--what our country and flag are as American as. Since the earliest colonial days, apple pies have been enjoyed in America for breakfast, for an entrée, and for dessert. Colonists wrote home about them and foreign visitors noted apple pie as one of our first culinary specialties."

We cannot claim to have invented the apple pie, just to have perfected it. As long ago as 1590, the English poet Robert Greene wrote in his Arcadia, "Thy breath is like the steame of apple-pyes." But Noah Webster's American dictionary of 1828 suggests a difference between British and American versions, the American having more crust: "a pie made of apples stewed or baked, inclosed in paste, or covered with paste, as in England." In England nowadays the term is more commonly apple tart.

American versions of apple pie are almost as many as the varieties of apples. There is, for example, apple cobbler (1859) with thick dough, the deep-dish apple dowdy or pandowdy (1880), apple crisp (1932) with a crumbly crust, and apple slump (1831), which, according to an 1848 writer, is "made by placing raised bread or dough around the sides of an iron pot, which is then filled with apples and sweetened with molasses."

Apple pie figures in our figurative language, too, as in the expressions simple as apple pie (since everyone supposedly knows how to make apple pie) and, though not an Americanism, apple-pie order (1780). But it was only in the twentieth century, apparently in the 1960s, that we began to be "as American as apple pie."