Apple pie

The Chatham Lane video is from last year but perfectly shows how Don and I prepared the apples today. I love having the frozen apples all ready for pies.

“We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.”
― David Mamet, Boston Marriage

The apple pie predates our country's settlement by hundreds of years, writes Lee Edwards Benning in Cook's Tales.
From all historical accounts, it seems that fruit pies as we now know them were invented by the Pennsylvania Dutch. Women in the southeastern counties of the state made delicious, crispy pies encasing every fruit in the region.
Colonists loved pie so much they ate it for every meal, but, notably, not every farmer could afford it. Thus, pies evolved into a symbol of status.
It is the fruition of this unique, thick, two-crusted apple pie, rather than the thin, one-crust English pie, in which we invest our pride. Ever wonder why July 4th parties are marked by apple pies? It’s a carryover from first Independence Day celebrations when the apple pie was at its peak importance to Americans.
"As American as apple pie" implies the improvement of what was once British; it is the mark of prosperity, freedom, and status as the apple pie represented to our ancestors. It is not a mistaken saying or an ignorant remark. It’s about the thick, two-crusted pie we made; the pie our ancestors longed for and cherished in their free homeland. It’s about patriotism and struggle to be an
American, to live the American dream.

The pie should be eaten "while it is yet florescent, white or creamy yellow, with the merest drip of candied juice along the edges, (as if the flavor were so good to itself that its own lips watered!) of a mild and modest warmth, the sugar suggesting jelly, yet not jellied, the morsels of apple neither dissolved nor yet in original substance, but hanging as it were in a trance between the spirit and the flesh of applehood...then, O blessed man, favored by all the divinities! eat, give thanks, and go forth, 'in apple-pie order!'"
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (on eating apple pie).

AS AMERICAN AS APPLE PIE - "America in So Many Words: Words that have Shaped America" by Allen Metcalf & David K. Barnhart" (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1997) has a section on the subject --"1697 apple pie." "Samuel Sewall, distinguished alumnus 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.' This 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 dinner. Colonist 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." But here's the surprising part. The expression "as American as apple pie," the authors say, is not that old. "Apple pie figures in our figurative language, too, as in the expressions 'simple as pie' (since everyone supposedly knows how to make apple pie) and, though not an Americanism, 'apple-pie order' . But it was only in the twentieth century, apparently in the 1960s, that we began to be 'as American as apple pie.'"