Have you heard of the phrase, as American as apple pie?
Despite the fact that apples have been traced back to Kazakhstan and apple pie was invented by Brits who were heavily influenced by Dutch and French cooking, in America, apple pie is defiantly American and always associated with goodness.
The lore began with John Chapman, who is more famously known as Johnny Appleseed. Chapman planted thousands of trees, including many varieties of apples, across the Midwest during the late 1700s. Around the same time as Chapman’s birth, women in Pennsylvania’s Dutch country invented new ways of preserving apples that made it possible to have apple pie year round. I can’t say for sure whether Chapman’s entire vision for life came from eating apple pie as a youngster, but I also can’t say for sure that it didn’t.
Approximately 100 years later in 1902, a fierce debate broke out in the pages on the New York Times. Responding to an article suggesting apple pie should only be eaten a maximum of twice per week, a passionate editor responded with one of the greatest paragraphs in American history:
“[Eating pie twice per week] is utterly insufficient, as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”
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