America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late? | Hacker News Reader

America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late?

washingtonpost.com

15 pointsmmettler24 comments

To everyone saying that Americans didn’t invent the pie: the article tells us in detail that pies in the US come from a long English tradition.

This is a delightful article on the history of pie, food, kitchen technology, and our dessert-eating habits.

The house I recently bought has a rhubarb patch, and I recall a neighbor making rhubarb pie many years ago when I was a kid. So I looked up some random recipes, kind of simplified to what I had on hand and it came out better than any store-bought pie I've had recently. Was much easier than I thought, and I don't have any specific training in this art form.

For the crust, you use 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 2 teaspoons sugar, and between 1/2 and 3/4 cup shortening (or lard works better), adding iced water while mixing until it is a stiff ball, which divides to make the top and bottom crusts.

The big trick though is if you have a filling that turns soupy when it cooks (like rhubarb does) then instead of mixing sugar in the filling you put a spread on the bottom crust, top it with your filling, then use dots of butter topped with sugar on the top before putting on the top crust. The sugar helps to caramelize the crust and keeps it from getting soggy.

This is bonkers. Pie making has never been so popular, judging by instagram bakers.

Pies generally seem pretty unpopular in the US. It’s almost impossible to find savoury pies except for bland chicken, and when you do they have bizarre fundamental misunderstandings, like making a shepherds' pie with... beef. Pies just don't seem to be on the US culinary radar for some reason.

What's a popular place to get savory pies? Desert pies are insanely sugary, and those are the ones you still see in bakeries.

British-themed restaurants will have meat pies, probably.

The savory pie is very homely, and so if you don't have that option you're pretty limited to what you make at home or Marie Callender. Also, at least from watching GBBO, British savory pies often use suet in the crust, which you would have to get from a butcher; I don't think I've ever seen pre-packaged suet in a supermarket.

What a complete load of nonsense. The Americans didn’t invent the pie - I know that it’s been around since at least Tudor times, and I suspect long before then. And Americans still seem to be baking lots of pies, if social media is anything to go by.

This is one of those quasi-political articles, a criticism of something about some identity group masquerading as nostalgic truism.

At least the URL indicates the article is about pie crust. I wouldn't say making pie crust from scratch is dead in the US, but I feel like store-bought and graham cracker crusts are pretty popular.

The South still makes its cobbler. :)

Yes. Yes we do.

What's your favorite? I think blackberry is mine.

Big fan of blueberry but it’s hard to go wrong with peach.

Pie is of course a metaphor for all the stuff now produced in low-wage countries.

This is the worst article I’ve ever read, I want my time back. Listing types of pies at least 3 times, complaining about people buying pie crust… write a recipe for your incredible pie, do a YouTube video, anything constructive to change this problem the author imagines, instead of spending 10,000 words complaining.

Wait. Americans invented pie?

No, both sweet and savory pies predate the Americas, with savory pies common in the medieval period, and sweet pies rare but still made, and only showing up near the end of the period.

> predate the Americas

Hmmm... I think the Americas have existed for as long as any other continent, and been populated for almost as long.

A pie is just a baked pastry with filling inside, and so there are probably pre-Columbian dishes which you could classify as a pie, although that starts getting into classification debate a la "is a hot dog a sandwich?"

The Wikipedia page for pie lists a Jamaican patty as a pie, which I guess is technically correct but I'm not sure how I feel about the classification.

I mean when someone says 'sweet and savory pies predate the Americas' are they suggesting that the Americas didn't exist until European colonisation?

Pie has existed from at least 2,000 BC. The Americas have been inhabited since at least 15,000 BC.

Unfortunately, we don't have great records of pre-Columbian food in the Americas. That being said, wrapping a filling in pastry, putting it in a dish, and baking it in an oven is not that hard to independently come up with.

The Columbian exchange has really big impacts on food even on countries that did not participate in colonization of the Americas. Potatoes don't exist in Russian cuisine until then; same for chili peppers in India or Korea.

> Unfortunately, we don't have great records of pre-Columbian food in the Americas

Yeah but that's all irrelevant.

They didn't say pie in Europe predated pie in the Americas. The said the idea of pie predated the Americas... entirely. Like we were eating pies before the existence of the continents of the Americas.

> both sweet and savory pies predate the Americas

Clearly, it didn't. The Americas didn't pop into existence when Europeans reached them. They were there before humans started to cultivate grasses to make pie crusts from.

You've chosen an unreasonable and silly interpretation of my words. There's no reason for this subthread to exist.

How should we read 'sweet and savory pies predate the Americas' that doesn't say that the Americas didn't exist until after pies?

A normal human bean would read that as, American ancestors had pies too so Americans didn't invent pies. lol

You're just being pedantic because you think native americans were left out but that's not the point of this weirdo thread.

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