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About pie
Pie--the filling and baking of sweet (fruits, nuts, cheese) or savory (meat, fish, eggs, cheese) ingredients and spices in casings composed of flour, fat, and water is an ancient practice. The basic concept of pies and tarts has changed little throughout the ages. Cooking methods (baked or fried in ancient hearths, portable colonial/pioneer Dutch ovens, modern ovens), pastry composition (flat bread, flour/fat/water crusts, puff paste, milles feuilles), and cultural preference (pita, pizza, quiche, shepherd's, lemon meringue, classic apple, chocolate pudding?) All figure prominently into the complicated history of this particular genre of food.
The first pies were very simple and generally of the savory (meat and cheese) kind. Flaky pastry fruit-filled turnovers appeared in the early 19th century. Some pie-type foods are made for individual consumption. These portable pies... pasties, turnovers, empanadas, pierogi, calzones...were enjoyed by working classes and sold by street vendors. Pie variations (cobblers, slumps, grunts, etc.) are endless!
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the word "pie" as it relates to food to 1303, noting the word was well-known and popular by 1362.
"Pie...a word whose meaning has evolved in the course of many centuries and which varies to some extent according to the country or even to region....The derivation of the word may be from magpie, shortened to pie. The explanation offered in favour or this is that the magpie collects a variety of things, and that it was an essential feature of early pies that they contained a variety of ingredients....Early pies were large; but one can now apply the name to something small, as the small pork pies or mutton pies...Early pies had pastry tops, but modern pies may have a topping of something else...or even be topless. If the basic concept of a pie is taken to mean a mixture of ingredients encased and cooked in pastry, then proto-pies were made in the classical world and pies certainly figured in early Arab cookery."
---The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] (p. 602-3)
American pies
"As a favored dish of the English, pies were baked in America as soon as the early settlers set up housekeeping on dry land. Beyond mere preference, howevers, there was a practical reason for making pies, especially in the harsh and primitive conditions endured by the first colonists. A piecrust used less flour than bread and did not require anything as complicated as a brick oven for baking. More important, though, was how pies could stretch even the most meager provisions into sustaining a few more hungry mouths...No one, least of all the early settlers, would probably proclaim their early pies as masterpieces of culinary delight. The crusts were often heavy, composed of some form of rough flour mixed with suet."
---Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Andrew Smith editor [Oxford University Press:New Yrok] 2004 (p. 272)
Pie crust
In its most basic definition, pie crust is a simple concoction of flour, fat, and water. In all times and places, the grade of the ingredients depends upon the economic status of the cook. Apicius [1st Century AD] makes reference to a simple recipe for crust (see below). Medieval cooking texts typically instruct the cook to lay his fruit or meat in a "coffin," no recipe provided. Up through Medieval times, pie crust was often used as a cooking receptacle. It was vented with holes and sometimes marked to distinguish the baker/owner. The crust was sometimes discarded. Pie crust has changed little through the ages.
"Pies and tarts...In the Middle Ages, these sweet and savory preparations baked in a crust were the specialty of patissiers--who had no other functions...We know that medieval cooks did not always have ovens, and they worked with patissiers, to whom they sometimes brought fillings of their own making for the patissier to place in a crust and bake. This explains why cookbooks intended for professional chefs were nearly silent about the ingredients of these pastry wrappings, but spoke only about consistency an thickness, and about the most suitable shapes...Still, medieval cooks might take a chance and cook a simple pie or tart on their own by placing it in a shallow pan, covered with a lid and surrounded by live embers, whose progress they had to monitor very closely...In effect, the pastry because an oven, ensuring moderate heat thanks to its insulating properties...So could it be that these pastry coverings were not necessarily eaten once they had done their job of containing and protecting the fillings?"
---The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, Odile Redon et al, [University of Chicago Press:Chicago] 1998 (p. 133-4)
Renaissance patissiers began experimenting with lighter, more malleable doughs. Recipes for short paste ("short" in this case means butter) and puff paste enter cookbooks at this time. 17th century English cook books and reveal several recipes for pie crust and puff paste, all of varying thickness, taste and purpose. Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook [1685] listed fourteen separate recipes for paste (pastry/pie crust/puff paste). American cook books (The Virginia Housewife, Mary Randoph [1828] & Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie [1849]) contain instructions for making pies with puff paste, sometimes decorating them with cut out pieces of this same paste. Mrs. Randolph's recipe for pumpkin pudding (pumpkin pie) states "put a paste around the edges and in the bottom of a shallow dish or plate, pour in the mixture, cut some thin bits of paste, twist them and lay them across the top and bake it nicely." (University of South Carolina Press:Columbia] 1984 ( p. 154). Mrs. Porter's New Southern Cookery Book [1879] reads: "Cranberry tart...line your plates with thin puff-paste, fill, lay strips of rich puff-paste across the top and bake in a moderate oven." (p. 299). There is no illustration to show us exactly how these strips looked.
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