According to traditions and statistics the chances are good that your Thanksgiving dining room table will hold one or more of the five most popular pies in America – apple, pumpkin, chocolate, lemon meringue or cherry. With the average American eating at least six slices of pie every year it goes without saying that pie is an important American traditional dessert. In fact we love pie so much that your holiday pies may be the only thing that outshines your beautiful solid wood dining table or buffet at this year’s gathering. Pie as we know it today in America has been a slowly evolving delight whose history is both intriguing and fun.

An interesting fact that you can be thankful for this Thanksgiving is that the Egyptians helped create the dessert that we now claim as being as “American as apple pie.” Historians believe that pie can most likely be credited to the ancient Egyptians where royal bakers created delicacies for the pharaohs. Bread dough was mixed with fruits and nuts and honey and served to the kings.

The Greeks, still known for their famous pastries, may have crafted the pie pastry from a flour and water paste that they wrapped around meat. The Romans, also known as some of the world’s greatest cooks, carried back from Greece recipes for making the meat pies. The Romans used every kind of meat in all of their meal’s courses, even dessert and used them in their puddings which were basically pies. The delights of these savory pies spread throughout Europe. Because all roads led to Rome, soon all of Europe was enjoying the early pies.

Another version of the English pie was the open-crust pastry with no tops or bottoms known as “traps.” These were more like our modern day casseroles whose baking pan was actually the very tough, usually inedible crust itself. Just as cute as the name a small personal pie was called a tartlet. The original tart was a larger and shallow open pie just like English tarts of today.

English “pyes” emerged about the 12th Century and evolved to “pie” about the 14th century. In today’s modern language the thought that something as delicious as pie could be called anything to do with something in a funeral seems odd to us. The original name for pies was “coffins” or in old English “coffyns”. These pies were actually savory meat pies whose crusts were tall, straight-sided and had sealed-on bottom and top crusts. The English baked up unusual creations inside those pies using creature meats from tortoise to peacock to partridges.

Tags: Amish Dining Room Table, apple pie, history of pie, holiday pies, pumpkin pie thanksgiving pie, solid wood dining table

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:57 pm and is filed under Holidays & Gift Ideas, Home Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.