Siskiyoumom
Veteran Member
The following is by a neighbors son, Owen Harling in response to a writing prompt for college admission. Copy Right 2021.
What’s so easy about pie?
To Know What You Devour: Pie, and Why it is Not as Easy as We Think
By Owen Harling
“All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens…”
Margaret Atwood (All Bread, Lines 1-5)
Pie is a dish with a myriad of purposes. Across our globe, there are innumerable varieties which encase sweet and savory fillings in various kinds of pastry, ready to burst in the mouth with their full flavor. However, there is more to any pie than meets the eye or mouth. In fact, any pie which rests steaming on a table is the product of thousands of years of human tradition and many more of complex biological processes. This essay will describe in detail the hard work and incredible chance that has produced a dish known and loved to many, proving that there is, in fact, nothing easy about pie.
While pies can be made with almost any ingredients, they are united by the commonality of their crust. The Art of Simple Food, a revolutionary cookbook by California chef Alice Waters, provides a recipe for pie and tart dough which can be completed in a little over an hour and primarily involves waiting for the butter in the dough to chill (Waters 174). However, the historical recipe for pie dough is far longer and harder than this may lead one to believe; and not just by a matter of hours. Phytolith analysis published in 2011 suggests that Poaceae, the grass family, evolved with genetic distinction over 100 million years ago (Prasad et al.). While one may rightly argue that necessarily precipitating this event would be the migration of plants onto land, or the first recorded instances of life on Earth, out of necessary brevity this paper will mark the speciation of grasses as the first cosmic nudge towards pie.
While evolution in and of itself is a process which is wildly unpredictable and based on chance mutations, the appearance of grasses was only the beginning. Without the domestication of wheat approximately 10,000 years ago, which gave rise to society as we know it today, pie would be unable to exist (Eckardt). For human and plant species to both alter their life histories in order to pursue a relationship of mutualism was a difficult process. People who had lived nomadically and foraged for their entire evolutionary history effectively needed to sacrifice their way of life in order to reach this critical point in history. However, the benefits are prevalent. Wheat and its relatives are responsible for the first pies, as well as the vast majority of pies in the modern day, an event which would have been impossible without thousands of years of chance and effort from plants and people.
Historians largely agree that the dish of pie with a crust and filling can be attributed first to the Egyptians around 4,000 years ago (BBC). After their innovation, pie and its applications spread to other eminent empires of the time, Greece and Rome. One Roman recipe instructs the reader to “make dough crumbs with flour and oil. Lay the dough over or around the ham, stud the top with pieces of the skin so that they will be baked with the dough,” (Apicius 169) making a dish that sounds very similar to some meat pies widely known and loved today. Without the innovation and environment of these civilizations, pie may never have reached the popularity it enjoys in the modern day. Therefore, the story of pie is also the story of the rise and fall of human settlements, the product of thousands of lives organizing around shared societal principles. Without their struggle, their successes and failures, and most of all their innovation, the dish would not exist today.
Ever since ancient civilizations made their first major contributions to pie, people have continued to explore and push the boundaries of what the dish can include and represent. Sweet pies represent one such break from tradition. For many years, savory fillings were largely unchallenged as the defining taste of pie. It was not until the reign of Elizabeth I, which began in 1558 (Morrill), that a British baker dared to go out on a limb by filling a crust with sweet cherries (BBC). It was during this time, as well, that British poet Robert Greene included the line “thy breath is like the steam of apple pies” in his poem Doron’s Eclogue (line 20). While this is regarded as the first literary reference to what is now considered an American classic, the preparation he cited was likely unsweetened and baked in an inedible crust. The journey from that dish to the ubiquity of unique apple pie variations available today was inevitably filled with bakers who tried things no one else had before. Behind each and every pie filling, there is a legacy of innovation. Pie is dependent on the hard work and dedication of people from a myriad of cultures and time periods who were willing to toil for the simple pleasure of a delicious bite.
Possibly the most significant complexity of pie, and surely most enduring, is that it is, quite literally, made of the Earth. Each bite of pastry-encased goodness is a product of compost, of favorable weather and symbiosis between plants and ground-dwelling organisms. The final stanza of Margaret Atwood’s poem All Bread suggests that “to know what you devour/is to consecrate it,/almost” (lines 25-27). While she speaks to another baked good, the axiom is just as applicable to pies. To eat pie, be it one filled with meat and spices or pecans and caramel, is to eat everything that must have happened to bring it to your plate. Pie is full to the brim with the sweetness of joy, the richness of culture and tradition, the tang of novelty and the salt of suffering. It’s recipe calls for lives and deaths, labor and rest, intention and chance. It spans time, the gooey richness of the present accentuated by the flakiness of history. Pie is not easy. Instead, it is thousands of years of drama and challenge which fit on a plate, wreathed in the delicious aroma of expectation.
Works Cited
Apicius. Apicius de re Coquinaria, or Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome. Translated by Joseph Vehling, 2009. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm.
Atwood, Margaret. “All Bread.” On Being, On Being with permission from Simon & Schuster, 2021, https://onbeing.org/poetry/all-bread/. Accessed 12 November 2021.
BBC. “A shortcrust history of pies.” BBC, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zmtn2sg.
Eckardt, Nancy A. “Evolution of Domesticated Bread Wheat.” PNAS, vol. 22, no. 4, 2010, p. 993. PNAS, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879753/.
Greene, Robert. “Menaphon: Doron's Eclogue.” Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto Libraries, 1589 (Original Text), https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/.../menaphon-dorons-eclogue. Accessed 23 December 2021.
Morrill, John S. “Elizabeth I.” Britannica, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-I/Accession. Accessed 23 December 2021.
Prasad, V., et al. “Late Cretaceous origin of the rice tribe provides evidence for early diversification in Poaceae.” Nature Communications, vol. 2, 2011, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1482#.
Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food. First ed., New York, Clarkson Potter, 2007.
What’s so easy about pie?
To Know What You Devour: Pie, and Why it is Not as Easy as We Think
By Owen Harling
“All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens…”
Margaret Atwood (All Bread, Lines 1-5)
Pie is a dish with a myriad of purposes. Across our globe, there are innumerable varieties which encase sweet and savory fillings in various kinds of pastry, ready to burst in the mouth with their full flavor. However, there is more to any pie than meets the eye or mouth. In fact, any pie which rests steaming on a table is the product of thousands of years of human tradition and many more of complex biological processes. This essay will describe in detail the hard work and incredible chance that has produced a dish known and loved to many, proving that there is, in fact, nothing easy about pie.
While pies can be made with almost any ingredients, they are united by the commonality of their crust. The Art of Simple Food, a revolutionary cookbook by California chef Alice Waters, provides a recipe for pie and tart dough which can be completed in a little over an hour and primarily involves waiting for the butter in the dough to chill (Waters 174). However, the historical recipe for pie dough is far longer and harder than this may lead one to believe; and not just by a matter of hours. Phytolith analysis published in 2011 suggests that Poaceae, the grass family, evolved with genetic distinction over 100 million years ago (Prasad et al.). While one may rightly argue that necessarily precipitating this event would be the migration of plants onto land, or the first recorded instances of life on Earth, out of necessary brevity this paper will mark the speciation of grasses as the first cosmic nudge towards pie.
While evolution in and of itself is a process which is wildly unpredictable and based on chance mutations, the appearance of grasses was only the beginning. Without the domestication of wheat approximately 10,000 years ago, which gave rise to society as we know it today, pie would be unable to exist (Eckardt). For human and plant species to both alter their life histories in order to pursue a relationship of mutualism was a difficult process. People who had lived nomadically and foraged for their entire evolutionary history effectively needed to sacrifice their way of life in order to reach this critical point in history. However, the benefits are prevalent. Wheat and its relatives are responsible for the first pies, as well as the vast majority of pies in the modern day, an event which would have been impossible without thousands of years of chance and effort from plants and people.
Historians largely agree that the dish of pie with a crust and filling can be attributed first to the Egyptians around 4,000 years ago (BBC). After their innovation, pie and its applications spread to other eminent empires of the time, Greece and Rome. One Roman recipe instructs the reader to “make dough crumbs with flour and oil. Lay the dough over or around the ham, stud the top with pieces of the skin so that they will be baked with the dough,” (Apicius 169) making a dish that sounds very similar to some meat pies widely known and loved today. Without the innovation and environment of these civilizations, pie may never have reached the popularity it enjoys in the modern day. Therefore, the story of pie is also the story of the rise and fall of human settlements, the product of thousands of lives organizing around shared societal principles. Without their struggle, their successes and failures, and most of all their innovation, the dish would not exist today.
Ever since ancient civilizations made their first major contributions to pie, people have continued to explore and push the boundaries of what the dish can include and represent. Sweet pies represent one such break from tradition. For many years, savory fillings were largely unchallenged as the defining taste of pie. It was not until the reign of Elizabeth I, which began in 1558 (Morrill), that a British baker dared to go out on a limb by filling a crust with sweet cherries (BBC). It was during this time, as well, that British poet Robert Greene included the line “thy breath is like the steam of apple pies” in his poem Doron’s Eclogue (line 20). While this is regarded as the first literary reference to what is now considered an American classic, the preparation he cited was likely unsweetened and baked in an inedible crust. The journey from that dish to the ubiquity of unique apple pie variations available today was inevitably filled with bakers who tried things no one else had before. Behind each and every pie filling, there is a legacy of innovation. Pie is dependent on the hard work and dedication of people from a myriad of cultures and time periods who were willing to toil for the simple pleasure of a delicious bite.
Possibly the most significant complexity of pie, and surely most enduring, is that it is, quite literally, made of the Earth. Each bite of pastry-encased goodness is a product of compost, of favorable weather and symbiosis between plants and ground-dwelling organisms. The final stanza of Margaret Atwood’s poem All Bread suggests that “to know what you devour/is to consecrate it,/almost” (lines 25-27). While she speaks to another baked good, the axiom is just as applicable to pies. To eat pie, be it one filled with meat and spices or pecans and caramel, is to eat everything that must have happened to bring it to your plate. Pie is full to the brim with the sweetness of joy, the richness of culture and tradition, the tang of novelty and the salt of suffering. It’s recipe calls for lives and deaths, labor and rest, intention and chance. It spans time, the gooey richness of the present accentuated by the flakiness of history. Pie is not easy. Instead, it is thousands of years of drama and challenge which fit on a plate, wreathed in the delicious aroma of expectation.
Works Cited
Apicius. Apicius de re Coquinaria, or Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome. Translated by Joseph Vehling, 2009. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29728/29728-h/29728-h.htm.
Atwood, Margaret. “All Bread.” On Being, On Being with permission from Simon & Schuster, 2021, https://onbeing.org/poetry/all-bread/. Accessed 12 November 2021.
BBC. “A shortcrust history of pies.” BBC, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zmtn2sg.
Eckardt, Nancy A. “Evolution of Domesticated Bread Wheat.” PNAS, vol. 22, no. 4, 2010, p. 993. PNAS, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2879753/.
Greene, Robert. “Menaphon: Doron's Eclogue.” Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto Libraries, 1589 (Original Text), https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/.../menaphon-dorons-eclogue. Accessed 23 December 2021.
Morrill, John S. “Elizabeth I.” Britannica, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-I/Accession. Accessed 23 December 2021.
Prasad, V., et al. “Late Cretaceous origin of the rice tribe provides evidence for early diversification in Poaceae.” Nature Communications, vol. 2, 2011, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1482#.
Waters, Alice. The Art of Simple Food. First ed., New York, Clarkson Potter, 2007.
