November 17, 2018 • 45 mins
Pie is an ancient food that began as a utilitarian and often inedible necessity and evolved over centuries into its current role as a sweet treat and dessert nemesis of cake. Cristen and Caroline get in the holiday cooking spirit by examining the anthropology of pie as well as its many gendered layers.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to stuff Mom
never told you. One thing some of you may not
know is that I am the co host of another
how stuff work show called Savor, all about food and drink,
(00:29):
and as you might imagine from that, I spend an
embarrassing amount of time thinking about food, particularly desserts, which
is funny because as a kid, I was not a
dessert fan. I didn't even want a dessert at my
birthday parties. I sold all of my Halloween candy for money,
and I made a lot of money. I marked up
that candy. But something happened around college and I developed
(00:49):
a real sweet tooth for baked goods. I have a
March Madness type bracket for my favorite desserts, and pie
is solidly on top, depending on the type of course,
but generally it's my go too. About a month ago,
at one of my friend's weddings, instead of a wedding cake,
they had five types of pie and it was just
(01:11):
about the best thing I've ever seen at a wedding.
Every year, I try to make a new pie for Thanksgiving,
one I've never made before, and I'm still mulling over
what it will be this year. But in the meantime,
I hope you enjoyed this classic episode about all things pie.
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how stupp
(01:32):
works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and since the holidays have arrived,
we decided to talk about pie for an entire podcast.
That's right, it's history. It's very multifaceted, beautiful, tasty, bubbly history. Yes,
(01:58):
and there's lots of gender involved with pie making that
we'll get into later. But first off, Caroline, I want
to ask you what your favorite pie is or do
you have a favorite pie. Are you more of a
cake person? Well, I gotta say I was not a
pie fan. When I was growing up. We didn't really
do pies in the urban household. We were cake people. Um,
(02:23):
so pecan pie was as adventurous as we would get. Honestly, Yeah,
I gotta say, I just prefer cake. Really, So, you
don't have a favorite pie, no, unless chocolate is involved. Really,
then that's my only stipulation. Oh yeah, chocolate can absolutely
be involved in a pie. Let me tell you, in fact, Caroline,
(02:44):
baking fact about your co host Kristen. I will not
refer to myself in the third person anymore. Is that
my family like known recipe that I and I alone
make is a French silk pie chocolate pie, and make
my own whip cream topping, which is not a part
(03:06):
of the roastby. I just put it on top because
what makes it pie better than whipped cream? Nothing? Yeah,
absolutely nothing. Um So, even though my family isn't a
super heavy and desserts, my mom always enjoyed baking, and
so I kind of inherited that from her. And I
love a good pie. I love a good pie. And
you know what I'm gonna say, I prefer pie to
(03:27):
cake because it's not as heavy as cake. Yeah. Wow. See,
I feel like pie with its pastry crust and it's
lattice work and it's uey, gooey nous. I feel like
pie is kind of heavy. We can we're gonna have
to agree to disagree wars. Well, you know, it's not
(03:49):
heavy actually, so I take back some of what I said.
My mom does quote unquote make a pie sometimes lemon
ice box pie, but nothing about it is homemade. So
it's the store about crust and it is like the jello,
you know, putting lemon pudding stuff with a cool whip
on top, and my dad eats it, and he's the
(04:10):
only one who eats it. That actually sounds pretty good
to me. But I guess it's only confirmation that I'm
I'm a pie person. I'm a pie lady. But one thing, though,
that is indisputable, is that pie at least beats cake
in terms of historical longevity. Pies have been around for
so long. Yeah, and they are very significant too, pretty
(04:31):
much every culture that has come before us. Yeah. We
learned some tasty historical facts about pie from the American
Pie Council, because yes, there's a pie lobby that exists,
and also from the New York Times, both of which
describe how pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians.
I feel like the ancient Egyptians always factor into our stuff.
(04:53):
I've never told you conversations. Um, and it was a
very old culinary invent And Janet Clarkson, who wrote Pie
a Global History, says that once upon a time, everything
baked in the oven that was not a bread was
a pie, right and and because the way that things
(05:15):
had to be cooked and preserved, I mean, it's not
like there were refrigerators or regular ovens hanging around, so
often food would be put into this sort of terrible
sounding clay like pastry and and baked in an effort
to preserve it. And the first pies were actually made
by early Romans who then may have learned about it
(05:36):
through the Greeks, who we think we're the originators of
the pastry shell, which they made by combining flour and water,
which sounds like such a basic thing. Obviously it's kind
of a cornerstone fundamental of baking. But that flower and
water combo was pretty revolutionary, and those pies using a
(05:58):
pastry shell very rudimentary. A street shell would have been
a step above what they used to do, which would
have simply been wrapping reads or large leafs around meats
in particular to preserve its juicy goodness. Just put that
pie in some grass, yeah, grass pie, for it sounds
(06:19):
like what I used to make in the backyard of
the child um. Anyways, So speaking of the Romans, they
enjoyed meat pies during the dessert course, so pie was
still a dessert for them, but it was it was meaty,
not not berry ish um and the first published Roman
pie recipe was for goat, cheese and honey pie, which
to me actually sounds incredible. Yeah, that sounds very good.
(06:40):
And Kato the Elder, for instance, wrote about the most
popular pie of his time, which was called placenta. Placenta pie.
You read about this in day Agricultura. And I don't
have the recipe for placenta in front of me, but
I believe it is one of those savory pies that
(07:00):
would have come out during the Secoon di mensa or
that dessert course. And I can only imagine the visual
now being created in listeners minds by the two words
plasent a pie. Well, I know what's being created in mine. Well,
so anyway, um, let's let's travel to England in the
twelfth century up pies. That's when pies originally appeared. And
(07:24):
of course they were spelled very early English e with
a y instead of an eye, and they were predominantly
meat pies. We really don't get into sweet fruity pies
until a lot later and during the Middle Ages. The
pie crust, like I was saying earlier, was more of
a baking dish. It was kind of a container and
food preserver, and it was so sturdy that cooks actually
(07:46):
might have reused it from time to time. Yeah, there's
some medieval text talking about how uh, the poorer masses
might have gotten the discards of this really thick, almost
an edible pie crust from wealthier people's pies. But this
was because of how meat was cooked at the time.
(08:08):
It was cooked on an open spit, which rendered it
drier and smaller because all those juices were being released,
and so people started wrapping it up to yeah, to
keep that almost like a pot pie, to keep all
that that meaty, juicy goodness inside. And they called this
(08:28):
bake meat m et And so for hundreds of years,
this primitive pie crust was really the only type of
baking dish available. And fun fact, because it really served
as a dish for your food rather than something that
would enhance the flavor of say a dessert, the crust
(08:49):
of pie was referred to as a coffin. M hmm, yeah,
that's weird and morbid. Well, because at that time, coffin
simply denoted baskets. Yeah sure right, Um well, often these
meaty pies were made using foul and the legs this
is I just the legs were left to hang over
(09:12):
the side of the dish and used as handles, which
also indicates how tough those pie p y e crusts
were at the time. Um. But when we move into
the fourteenth century, by this point the Oxyford English Dictionary
notes that pie had become a popular word, so clearly
(09:34):
you know people were eating pie. There was a lot
of pie going around. And then in the sixteenth century
in England we have the emergence of fruit pies or
tarts also called pasties. And I love this English tradition
credits the making of the first cherry pie to Queen
Elizabeth the first Is she the type? Is she the
(09:56):
type true of made of pie? I don't see Queen
Elizabeth the verse making a pie at all. I don't either,
But I mean, I guess those are the kinds of
benefits you get if you are a queen. People just
say you do marvelous things such as make the first
cherry pie. Yeah, And I would have asked, Queen Elizabeth,
I would have accepted that compliment, and I would have saiden. Indeed,
(10:17):
these days, if you were queen, your your special thing
would probably be in contemporary terms of like Queen Caroline, you,
oh yes, you invented working. Of course she took the
first selfie. You're exactly right. I actually take credit for
T working anyway, Um and T working selfies. That's right. So,
(10:41):
speaking of pie events in the sixteenth century, apple pie
is mentioned in the fifty nine poem by Our Green
Thy breath is like the steam of apple pies, hot
cinnamon breath. Basically, um, but pies all so took a
weird turn around this time as well, because there was
(11:05):
a meat pie craze. This was described in an article
in The l A Times talking about the history of
pot pies, and it mentions that a mid sixteenth century
cookbook included a recipe for a and just vegetarians and
vegans listening, you might want to put down your headphones
right now because it was a five bird pie in
(11:28):
which each bird was stuffed inside the other bird, and
then all of that wrapped up in in a pie.
So like the predecessor to a tur duck in yes,
but pie, but pie, but that could only be topped
by pies that would contain live birds and animals. This
(11:52):
was like a really fun party trick for super rich people.
They would say, make me a pie with with live snakes,
and sorry of it. Yeah, like Indiana gents. Um. Well
at least it wasn't monkey brains, I guess. But I
mean they also had people popping out of pies. Yeah,
I mean the we think of like the cheesy woman
(12:13):
popping out of a cake today, But people did pop
out of these pies. They did not go through the oven.
But yeah, there are stories about like little people popping
out of pies and then serving as the court jester,
or a young woman who popped out of a pie
and she was bound to symbolize like the religious constraints
of of the pope. You know, they got elaborate with
(12:35):
these pies. Yeah, that whole nursery rhyme about a sing
a song of sixpence that talks about how many four
blackbirds baked in a pie That is in reference to
these quote unquote surprise pies that are full of surprises,
and by surprises live animals and people. Well, so do
you eat? Was there anything once the birds flew out
(12:57):
of the pie? Was there anything to eat in it?
Because I'd be afraid they were just be a lot
of bird Do do inside of it? Well? Probably if
you were at a feast hosted by someone as wealthy
as to have one of these surprise pies I'm imagining.
And also because like medieval tapestries would show this that
there would be a table before you laden with other dishes.
(13:17):
So maybe it's you know that sounds delicious, Yeah, minus
the birds that are flying, minus minus the bird poop
from all of those. But that's a general life policy, yes, yes, well,
(13:39):
so speaking of cakes, also, cakes were not the original
wedding food. Before wedding cakes, bride pies were popular in
England the seventeenth century. Bride pies were probably actually savory
rather than sweet, and there was a tradition of putting
a glass ring inside them and whatever woman got a
piece with the ring was said to be the next bride.
(14:02):
Also sounds dangerous, uh, in terms of tooth chipping. Well,
judging by how fast I tend to eat pastries and pies,
I would probably suck that sucker down. You just swallow it. Yeah,
oh okay. But we have that shift though toward the
popularity of the wedding cake, as well as the tradition
(14:24):
of the white wedding dress with the marriage of Queen
Victoria to Prince Albert in eighteen forty. But One of
the reasons too, why you would have savory bride pies
as opposed to wedding cakes is because of the price
of sugar. The price of sugar was very high, um.
But Queen Victoria had a nine foot tall wedding cake
(14:46):
that I believe waged five pounds um. But a lot
of this was the product of people donating goods to
this royal wedding feast, because even for a queen, all
that sweet cake would have been such an exorbitant expense. Also,
(15:07):
you know when when the English colonists moved over to America,
they brought the pie tradition with them. This is coming
again from the American Pie Council in the New York
Times and Time magazine. The colonists basically eight pie out
of necessity because it was an incredibly calorie dense food
and like we said, it could preserve quite a few
(15:28):
of their food items. Yeah. And Andrew F. Smith, who's
a food historian and author, said that the crust was
a bit of a problem because there were none of
the Old World grains. But if settlers had a pie
tin and maze that worked. And he talks about how
pies use less flour than bread and could be easily
and cheaply baked. And again though these early American pie
(15:53):
crusts weren't so much intended to be eaten as designed
to hold the filling. During the bay A King and
during the American Revolution, the term crust was used instead
of coffin. So we're still having evolution of pie making,
even as the crust part is still not so much delectable. Well,
(16:16):
and plus, I mean, pie was your handy dandy finger
food because before the mid mid eighteen hundreds, most Americans
didn't have forks. We went for a long time in
our nation's history without having many forks. So we were
a nation founded upon hot pockets ascension. Yeah, I think
(16:36):
that we. Yes, this episode is brought to you by
hot pockets. Now. Even though most Americans didn't have forks
before the mid nineteenth century, what we did have, though
was pumpkin pie. Because the first recipe known recipe at
least for pumpkin pie was written in the seventeenth century
(16:57):
in England, and it was really just like, hey, we've
got the squash, spice it up, put it in one
of your coffins, and bought a boom. You've got pumpkin pie.
But then when we come over to the America's it
wasn't popularized over here until the early eighteen hundreds. Yeah,
it originated from the delectable British spiced and boiled squash. Boiled,
(17:21):
they boiled it. Oh, we get a soft in it somehow. Well,
I guess, yeah, yeah, you're you're not wrong. Um. But
apple pie another another favorite. It's an old World fruit
introduced by the colonists, and apple pies could be saved
over the winter and ice houses, so it was a
great sweet, as we said, calorie riffic treat that they
(17:43):
could rely on to get them through long cold winters. Yeah.
But speaking of that sweet treat, one of the appeals
of an apple pie maybe was that it was naturally sweet,
because again, these old World pies would not have had
the benefit of sugar because again the price of sugar
was so high for so long, so instead of using sugar,
(18:06):
the initial pie of sweeteners would have been things like
maple syrup and molasses. Although once the price of sugar
started to drop in the United States in the mid
eighteen hundreds, you have more and more sweeter pies take over.
Because in sevente a cookbook from the time listed only
three types of sweet pies, but then by the late
(18:27):
eighteen hundreds you only have still eight types of sweet pies.
But by nineteen forty seven, the modern Encyclopedia of Cooking
lists sixty five different varieties of sweet pies. Yeah, and
that Graham cracker crust that my mother buys from the
grocery store to use in my father's weird jello lemon
(18:48):
ice box pies. It's infinitely easier than a pastry cut crust.
But it's relatively new, and it didn't come around until
about the nineteen thirties, and it was it was very
controversial among pie people. But I'm gonna go ahead and
say it. A Graham cracker crust is just so good. Well,
I think in my mind a Graham cracker crust is
(19:09):
second only to an Oreo crust. Oh, I agree with
you there. Yeah, that's another thing about my signature French
silk pie. I'll make an Oreo crust for it. Well. No,
my my aunt every year makes for Thanksgiving. Her specialty
is making a cheesecake, a beautiful plain cheesecake with an
Oreo crust, and it is I could eat the whole thing.
But here is here's a fun fact about American pie traditions.
(19:34):
Because the most popular pie in the United States is
the apple pie, there's a whole saying of as American
as apple pie. We've got bye bye, I'm miss American pie.
You know, we're all about apple pie over here. But
it was not America's first beloved pie. In fact, George
(19:54):
Washington himself was not an apple pie guy so much
as a sweet eat red pie, which means that old
Martha Washington because this was in one of her rescue books.
She liked to make a sweet red pie pie for
Georgie boy. But sweetbreads are not so sweet as savory
(20:14):
because they are animal intestines. Yeah, like organ meats. Oh
what's worse? Birds popping out of your pie or organ meats? Well,
I will at least you wouldn't have to eat the
empty bird crust thing crust pie. So contrary to all
of this American lore about apple pies being the most
(20:35):
American thing, it was actually mince pie that was America's
number one treat during the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
and mince pie had some surprises in it, namely, rum yeah.
During prohibition. In fact, mince pie became sort of like
a bootleggers delight because, as pointed out in a great
(20:57):
article on the history of mince pie in The Chicago Reader,
a nineteen nineteen article in the Chicago Tribune reported that
the average alcohol content of canned mints like the filling,
the mince pie filling, the alcohol content was fourteen point
one two per cent. That's that's a heavy pie. Yeah,
(21:21):
that is a heavy pie. But before then, though, Americans
were already crazy about mince pie. I mean, what was
it there was Oh yeah, there was an eighteen eighty
article in the Montpellier Argus and Patriot that said, mince pie,
like masonry, arouses curiosity from the mystery attaching to it.
(21:41):
It's popularity shall never wane until faith is lost in sight.
That's how much we loved mince pie. Yeah, And the
guy and the reader was comparing the downfall, the fading
out of the mince pie popularity too, if we suddenly
just decided to stop eating cheeseburgers as a nation, Like,
(22:02):
it was that popular and that ingrained in our diet.
But it was also similar to us loving cheeseburgers, so much.
We also knew that it wasn't so good for us
because mince pie is essentially a combination of animal fat
and sort of roast beef ish type of meat ground up,
(22:24):
and then you had a bunch of spices and obviously
a lot of booze if it's during prohibition, and you
bake it all together. And this guy in the Chicago
Reader baked his own mince pie and he enjoyed it
for its fatty, spicy goodness. Um. But there were some
strange things that were going along with this mince pie craze,
(22:45):
such as Albert Allen's mince pie defense in nineteen o seven. Yeah,
so Alan was in Chicago and he used mince pie
as a defense for fatally shooting his wife in nineteen
oh seven. He said that he was this mince pie
had created such bad nightmares that he was like gambling
and someone was trying to steal money from him, and
(23:06):
so he wanted in his dream, wanted to shoot the guy.
And he woke up and he had shot his wife dead. Yeah.
And there was another case where a guy on a
boat died and at first I thought there was foul play,
but it turned out that he had just eaten way
too much mince pie. And so for that reason, there
were all these warnings about the bizarre side effects of
(23:28):
eating mince pie, because apparently you couldn't eat just one piece.
For all these stories about people eating like entire mins pies, um,
and it led to things like, of course indigestion, but
also nightmares, hallucinations, and even just just death. Reading that
Chicago Reader article, and you know, reading all of the
(23:50):
ingredients that the guy used, I mean the amount of
animal fat, like weird, weird animal fat that he put
into it. I'm sure it did like instantly clog your arteries,
but I can also imagine how savory that probably is
as well. Again, vegetarians and vegans, I am sorry, but
(24:11):
the topic of our Thanksgiving podcast, The Mother of Thanksgiving herself,
Sarah Josepha Hale, makes an appearance in the mince pie craze. Yeah.
She wrote in eighteen forty one in the Victorian American
cookbook The Good Housekeeper the dangers of eating too much
of this pie, well pie in general, right, not just
(24:34):
mince pie. Um. She talked about how people of delicate
constitutions um should not eat pie because it would injure them,
and that the nature of pastry is just indigestible, and
so she said, it would really be a great improvement
in the matter of health if people would eat their
delicious summer fruits with good light bread instead of working
(24:54):
up the flour with water and butter to a compound
that almost defies the digestive powers and baking their in
the fruits till they lose nearly all their fine original flavor.
So Americans have been panicking about the national diet for ever,
it seems like yeah, well, especially since they tied it
into like doing crazy things like eating poorly and drinking
(25:15):
too much made you just act like a crazy person. Well,
and also at the turn of the century there was
this movement towards more exercise for people focusing on diet.
I mean, speaking of Graham crackers, you have the invention
of the graham cracker that was supposed to be you know,
that your staple food that you kind of lived off
up to be healthier. So men spies bore some of
(25:39):
the brunt for that. And also just at that time,
people were making a lot of pies because for so
long it was the standard way that we ate food. Um,
but piemaking did go through a twentieth century decline because
of things like women entering the workforce, and so we
(26:01):
didn't have all that time to make pies. I know,
I can't imagine. I can't imagine the amount of time
dedicated to cooking all of these meals every day, cooking
elaborate pies from scratch. Um. Piemaking did rebound a little
bit after World War Two because modern food advances appeared
that made pie making easier. You have things like shortening,
(26:23):
You have ready made crusts, box mixes, and instant pudding.
You have refrigeration. Although all of those post World War
two innovations that were so time changing and revolutionary in
those kitchens at the time would now be very much
looked down upon by modern piemakers who are all about
going old school with no shortening and using good butter
(26:47):
and flour. Um. And apparently there was in the nineteen
eighties a pie revival, it's according to the History kitchen.
And I feel like pie making and baking is really
regaining a lot of attention today as well. But it's
funny to look back and see that the most popular
(27:08):
pies in our country still hearken back to those earlier
eras of needing to preserve food, living off of the land,
needing to have something to do with strange confounding gourds
like pumpkins, because, according to a two thousand eight survey
from the American Pie Council and Crisco, of Americans prefer
apple pie, followed by pumpkin at thirteen pecan at twelve,
(27:32):
banana cream at ten percent, and cherry at nine percent.
What I want to know is where are the key
lime pie lovers? Hello? Are you out there? Because I'm
sitting here because and I love a key lime piel
and pie. Maybe they had weird stipulations about the ingredients.
I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, but
I will say that cherry pie always makes me think
(27:54):
of twin peaks as well, and it makes me crave
cherry pie. God, I just want pie, Caroline, I know,
I really just want a lot of food. Right now,
I'm I'm yeah, it's pie hour and by that I
mean lunchtime. Um, but we've got to now talk about
gender and pie because there is a funny thing about
(28:16):
pie wherein you don't see a lot of culinary evolution.
We're still eating the same pies that our forefathers and
four mothers were eating, and in a similar kind of way,
pie making, the act of making a pie is still
very much linked specifically to the female experience. Absolutely. I mean,
(28:39):
you know, back in the day, that's that's who was
in the kitchen making those pies, whether it was from
scratch or whether it was using those modern pie advances.
And in two thousand eight Pie Slice of Life Survey
Man two thousand eight was a big year for pie surveys.
I was conducted by Schwann's Consumer Brands of North America.
They asked survey respondents which mother would make the best pie,
(29:05):
because obviously they you know, wouldn't be which person It
would have to be a stereotypical TV mom. Yeah, of course. Well,
so respondents said that Carol Brady of the Brady Bunch
of People picked her to make the best pie out
of all the TV moms, followed by the Cosby Shows
Claire Huxtable with and to that, I say, please, Clare
(29:25):
Exetable doesn't have time to make a pie. She's a lawyer.
I was thinking the same thing. Well anyway, coming in
third with sixteen percent, was desperate Housewives Brie van de
Camp and Everybody Loves Raymonds Deborah Barone with We should
also know, though, that the same survey did also ask
who makes the best pie. The number one answer was mom,
(29:48):
Number two was well, your grocery store. A number three
was grandma. So again we have, uh, you know, women
making the pies. And there is a book called Can
She Bake a cheer Ry Pie? American Women and the
Kitchen in the twentieth Century by Mary Drake mcpheely, and
she talks about how in the rural America of the past,
(30:11):
a woman's reputation might be attached to her piemaking skills.
And she talks about this folk song called Billy Boy,
which I had forgotten that I knew. We used to
sing it when I was a kid, And there's this
verse about how well can she make a cherry pie?
Charming Billy because he's talking about this amazing woman that
he met, and it's like, well, yeah, she might so
(30:33):
be great and really pretty, but can she bake you
a pie? And he's like, yes, she can make a pie.
She's the apple of my eye. And then they're like, okay,
in that case, Billy, go ahead. Marry this woman, thank God,
because who cares about any other skills? Yeah? Um. But
even though as home cooking became less essential, mcpheeley says,
(30:55):
piemaking continued to be seen as a measure of a
woman's true all you. Yeah, I mean I think, I think, uh,
women are kind of getting the chaft there. If our
our skills and our value is based on our our
cooking ability. Although I mean, you know, like my mother
and in our house has always done all of the cooking,
(31:16):
it just seems like it's more of more of the
woman's domain. And much like Sarah Josefa Hale wanted Thanksgiving,
for instance, to serve as a time for women to
show off their culinary skills and really be able to
get in there and celebrate a holiday. For once, pies
were kind of that bump up to. It was like,
(31:37):
you know, show off your skills with lattice designs, crazy things,
with crazy pastry shapes and things. Yeah. I feel like
pie making is deceptively difficult, because I've tried to make
a number of pies and honestly, one of the reasons
why I make French silk pie is because it's so simple.
You literally melt chocolate, melt butter, put in a bunch
(32:01):
of sugar, and mix it until it's smooth and poured
into an oreo shell or whatever gonna shell you want.
But to make a fruit pie one that has that thick,
but gooey, perfect filling, and to do something like a
lattice work, I have tried and failed so many times,
(32:21):
and it might taste okay, But to make a pie
that looks good and taste good is such a challenge.
And I feel like we always think that cakes are
so impressive because you they have to rise and they're
these these creations are almost like just like the huge
towers and you have the frosting and all the stuff
that's going on, whereas pies might look so simple to
(32:45):
pull off. But I can see how, in the complexity
of actually making pies, how that translates to being this
sort of milestone culinary task historically for women, because like, well,
if you can make a pie, then you must be
good at other things well. And I mean even the
(33:08):
act of baking is celebrated by some as a feminist act.
Nigella Lawson, famous TV cook, got slammed for saying that
baking is a feminist act. She said, baking is the
less applauded of the cooking arts, whereas restaurants are a
male province to be celebrated. There's something intrinsically misogynistic about
decrying a tradition because it has always been female. I'm
(33:31):
not being entirely facetious when I say it's a feminist tract.
But speaking of feminism and pie making, we did find
a paper that looked into dessert making not so much
as a culinary action, what how that relates to women's
gender roles, but how we refer to women often in
(33:54):
terms of pie and other sweets. This was a paper
by Caitlin Hines called Rebaking the Pie but Woman as
dessert metaphor, and she talks about how, for instance, by
eighteen sixty four, the word tart, which is a type
of pie, it had the slang definition of a term
of approval to a young woman for whom some attraction
(34:16):
is felt. And you know, here women being referred to
as slices of pie or slices of cake, which Hinz
talks about how that implies objectification, sexual consumption, and that
like pie, women are a simply meant for sharing. Yeah,
she writes as desserts, women can be bought, sold, eaten,
elaborately decorated, admired for their outward appearance, dismissed as sinful
(34:40):
and decadent, etcetera, etcetera. And she cites the late Alan
Dundee's who was a UC Berkeley antropology professor, and basically
he discusses the socially sanctioned saccharine quality of females, which
is confirmed later in life by such terms of endearment
a sweetheart, honey bunch, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so basically,
you know, saying that these terms, these sugary terms, are
(35:05):
a way to dismiss women, kind of in one fell swoop.
But I mean, the thing is that reading this paper
about women as dessert metaphors, like I understand it, there's
obviously a lot of power in language. And when you
stop and think about the terms and the slang that
we used to refer to people who are not exactly
like ourselves, you can uncover some problematic things in that.
(35:31):
But with this whole conversation about piemaking and whether or
not it might be wrong to call someone sweetie pie,
I think I don't think that that that's the issue.
I don't see anything wrong with you know, women making pies.
I love to make pies. I love to eat pies. Um.
I don't know. It's like where I feel like when
(35:53):
in reading that kind of uh analysis, that kind of
really specific analysis on the intersection of pies and desserts
and feminism, what did you think was it? Is it
kind of too much at that point? I I mean
I tried to keep an open mind reading that paper, um,
(36:13):
because I see what she's getting at as far as
using terminology, using slang to dismiss women or or somehow
reduce them. Um. But yeah, I mean it's it's it's
the paper talking about women as pastry. But that ties
perfectly back to what Nigella Lawson was saying in terms
(36:34):
of don't dismiss baking as a less legitimate or respectable
form of a culinary art compared to something like molecular gastronomy,
something that seems you know, more scientific, um or or
more male you know. Um. So it's fascinating when you
sit and think about the gender politics tied up with pie,
(36:57):
because even today it's still considered a female province. The
making of the pie There was this blog post over
at Chow from two thousand seven talking about cookbook that
was put out at the time by Patti Pinner called
Sweetie Pies an Uncommon collection of womanish observations with pie,
(37:18):
and the blogger Kara's Wairo talks about how the entire
cookbook is a gender specific spin on the art of
pie baking. Yeah, she quotes Pinner who says, uh that
she is a descendant of that generation where a woman's appearance, manner,
and domestic prowess were synonymous with her feminine identity and
(37:41):
that kind of uh in light of talking about baking
and a woman's place and feminism and everything. I mean,
that's kind of that takes you aback for a minute. Um,
But I think Penner is celebrating pies and baking and
just that that kind of artistry that goes along with it.
Is weird that she said that she's a descendant of
(38:03):
that generation where you're feminine identity was synonymous with your
domestic prowess. But it's I feel like we have more
maybe freedom to reclaim a lot of that stuff these days.
There has been a revival of domestic arts, whether it
is piemaking, or baking or knitting or canning, whatever it
(38:26):
might be. I feel like a lot of women are
circling back to these kinds of slower ways of making
things in the home. Yeah. Well, I mean yeah, we've
talked about stuff like that before, like even with our
Manic Pixie dream Girl podcast, you know where it's like, well,
you shouldn't dis you know, girly things or baking or
(38:47):
cupcakes just because they make you think of some type
of woman that you don't like, or you know whatever.
We shouldn't dismiss people's pastimes or eating habits or baking
habits just because we also tend to associate them with
a bygone era exactly. Yeah. And by the same token,
we shouldn't dismiss maybe men who want to get in
(39:09):
on the pie baking game. I for one would love
it if my boyfriend never wanted to make me a pie,
I should just ask him. I bet he just baked
me a pie. Bake me a pie, please, sir um.
But speaking of which, there was a recent post by
this guy, Brian O'Neal over the Post Gazette and m
(39:29):
He talks about how he made his very first pie.
He was like, I know, This probably doesn't sound like
a big deal to you, but he says, quote, I
was born in ninety six, a member of one of
the last generations for which gender roles were rigidly defined,
at least in my house, and it was a celebratory
act for him. He was like, I made an apple
(39:50):
pie and it was delicious, and I didn't make the
crust myself, but I still felt pretty cool doing this thing.
That would have felt like a subversive act for a
man of my generation. Yeah. I mean if he had
done that, if he had been that age the year
he was born making that pie, people would be like,
what are you? Why are you doing that? Let your
(40:10):
wife do that? Why are you cooking that pie? Where's
your Betty Draper? You need some scotch go sit down. Um.
But speaking of male bakers, you know now we want
to hear from you, guys. We want to know whether
or not you're baking pies, ladies, anybody else. What's your
favorite pie? Do you enjoy piemaking or are you more
(40:31):
more of a cake person like Caroline. I'm not gonna judge, really,
I I don't discriminate against any sweets, but you know what,
it's so there are plenty of people who prefer the
cake over the pie. I just I'm just more in
the pie camp, which may or may not have been
part of my interests of pursuing this podcast topic. Um
(40:52):
but yet again, I do feel like pie is one
of those topics where it seems so simple and unassuming,
but when you start unpacking the history, there's so much. Yeah.
I mean it fed entire cultures for centuries. It was
the way that people sustain themselves. That it was brought
(41:12):
to the New world, you know, it was entertainment. It
was Yeah, so many different things. And bride pie I
like that idea. Screw wedding case, savory bread. Bye, I'll
haven't mid spie my wedding. Please, So send us all
of your pie related thoughts and any pictures of pie.
I'll appreciate that any pie recipes send them all our way,
(41:37):
because it's the holidays and it's time to eat, folks.
So email us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is
where you can send your letters. You can also tweet us,
tweet us pie picks at Mom's Stuff podcast, or you
can also message us on Facebook and we've got a
couple of messages to share with you when we come
right back from a quick break and now back to
(42:07):
our letters. So we have a couple of letters here
from our episode on Fettion Affection Revolution, and this first
one is from Lisa. She writes, I am a plus
size woman, size twenty four, and I'm also a teacher
at a local high school. I've always been self conscious
about my weight because I haven't always been plus size.
(42:31):
I realized that I have a great power to influence
how young women see themselves just by the way that
I talk about and dress myself. Can it be hard
to find fashionable plus size clothes? You bet you, But
the hunt is with it for me, and I am
still young seven and I know that my students are
looking at me as a role model. What kind of
message would I send if I work clothes it didn't
(42:52):
fit properly, baggy or too tight, or if I hunched
and was constantly trying to hide my body. I'm a fun, smart,
likable payer sent in My weight has nothing to do
with that. I try to look my best every day
so my students see that it doesn't matter what size
you are if you love yourself and love others. I
want to show them a woman who is not ashamed
of herself in any way, a woman who knows it's
(43:14):
what's inside your head and your heart that matters. And
how do I accomplish that by my demeanor, my carriage,
and my style. Let's stop worrying about our size and
worry more about our self worth and the messages we
are sending to the next generation of women. Here here, Lisa,
good for you. Um I have a letter here from
Danielle about our Fatchion episode, and I just want to
(43:34):
say thank you for including the picture of your freaking
adorable dog. I squealed. Um. So, Danielle says, I'm an overweight,
twenty three year old woman and I have struggled with
finding cute clothes that are well made for years. I
am so glad that you did a podcast on the
world of Fatchan. And even though I'm a plus size woman,
I had never heard of the Fatchan movement. I don't
(43:56):
know how that is even possible, but I loved it.
Although I want the women who is trying to get
healthier and work out a few times a week, which
is when I tend to listen to you a podcast,
I do love being able to find clothes that fit
my body now so that I can still look and
feel good while trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Also,
you ask for places to find cute plus sized clothing,
and one site that I found that I really like
(44:18):
is simply be dot com. I just got a Christmas
dress from there and I'm eagerly awaiting. It's a rival
so awesome. Thank you for your letter, Daniel, and thanks
to everybody who's written in. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send your letters. You can
follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast, find us
on Facebook and like us while you're at it. We're
on Tumbler as well at stuff Mom Never Told You
(44:40):
dot tumbler dot com, and also on Instagram. Oh please
instagram us your pie pictures. We are at stuff Mom
Never Told You. And last, but certainly not least, you
should head over to YouTube and check us out over
there too. We're at YouTube dot com, slash stuff Mom
Never Told You, and don't forget to subscribe for more
(45:03):
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
stuff Works dot com
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to stuff Mom
never told you. One thing some of you may not
know is that I am the co host of another
how stuff work show called Savor, all about food and drink,
(00:29):
and as you might imagine from that, I spend an
embarrassing amount of time thinking about food, particularly desserts, which
is funny because as a kid, I was not a
dessert fan. I didn't even want a dessert at my
birthday parties. I sold all of my Halloween candy for money,
and I made a lot of money. I marked up
that candy. But something happened around college and I developed
(00:49):
a real sweet tooth for baked goods. I have a
March Madness type bracket for my favorite desserts, and pie
is solidly on top, depending on the type of course,
but generally it's my go too. About a month ago,
at one of my friend's weddings, instead of a wedding cake,
they had five types of pie and it was just
(01:11):
about the best thing I've ever seen at a wedding.
Every year, I try to make a new pie for Thanksgiving,
one I've never made before, and I'm still mulling over
what it will be this year. But in the meantime,
I hope you enjoyed this classic episode about all things pie.
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from how stupp
(01:32):
works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and since the holidays have arrived,
we decided to talk about pie for an entire podcast.
That's right, it's history. It's very multifaceted, beautiful, tasty, bubbly history. Yes,
(01:58):
and there's lots of gender involved with pie making that
we'll get into later. But first off, Caroline, I want
to ask you what your favorite pie is or do
you have a favorite pie. Are you more of a
cake person? Well, I gotta say I was not a
pie fan. When I was growing up. We didn't really
do pies in the urban household. We were cake people. Um,
(02:23):
so pecan pie was as adventurous as we would get. Honestly, Yeah,
I gotta say, I just prefer cake. Really, So, you
don't have a favorite pie, no, unless chocolate is involved. Really,
then that's my only stipulation. Oh yeah, chocolate can absolutely
be involved in a pie. Let me tell you, in fact, Caroline,
(02:44):
baking fact about your co host Kristen. I will not
refer to myself in the third person anymore. Is that
my family like known recipe that I and I alone
make is a French silk pie chocolate pie, and make
my own whip cream topping, which is not a part
(03:06):
of the roastby. I just put it on top because
what makes it pie better than whipped cream? Nothing? Yeah,
absolutely nothing. Um So, even though my family isn't a
super heavy and desserts, my mom always enjoyed baking, and
so I kind of inherited that from her. And I
love a good pie. I love a good pie. And
you know what I'm gonna say, I prefer pie to
(03:27):
cake because it's not as heavy as cake. Yeah. Wow. See,
I feel like pie with its pastry crust and it's
lattice work and it's uey, gooey nous. I feel like
pie is kind of heavy. We can we're gonna have
to agree to disagree wars. Well, you know, it's not
(03:49):
heavy actually, so I take back some of what I said.
My mom does quote unquote make a pie sometimes lemon
ice box pie, but nothing about it is homemade. So
it's the store about crust and it is like the jello,
you know, putting lemon pudding stuff with a cool whip
on top, and my dad eats it, and he's the
(04:10):
only one who eats it. That actually sounds pretty good
to me. But I guess it's only confirmation that I'm
I'm a pie person. I'm a pie lady. But one thing, though,
that is indisputable, is that pie at least beats cake
in terms of historical longevity. Pies have been around for
so long. Yeah, and they are very significant too, pretty
(04:31):
much every culture that has come before us. Yeah. We
learned some tasty historical facts about pie from the American
Pie Council, because yes, there's a pie lobby that exists,
and also from the New York Times, both of which
describe how pie has been around since the ancient Egyptians.
I feel like the ancient Egyptians always factor into our stuff.
(04:53):
I've never told you conversations. Um, and it was a
very old culinary invent And Janet Clarkson, who wrote Pie
a Global History, says that once upon a time, everything
baked in the oven that was not a bread was
a pie, right and and because the way that things
(05:15):
had to be cooked and preserved, I mean, it's not
like there were refrigerators or regular ovens hanging around, so
often food would be put into this sort of terrible
sounding clay like pastry and and baked in an effort
to preserve it. And the first pies were actually made
by early Romans who then may have learned about it
(05:36):
through the Greeks, who we think we're the originators of
the pastry shell, which they made by combining flour and water,
which sounds like such a basic thing. Obviously it's kind
of a cornerstone fundamental of baking. But that flower and
water combo was pretty revolutionary, and those pies using a
(05:58):
pastry shell very rudimentary. A street shell would have been
a step above what they used to do, which would
have simply been wrapping reads or large leafs around meats
in particular to preserve its juicy goodness. Just put that
pie in some grass, yeah, grass pie, for it sounds
(06:19):
like what I used to make in the backyard of
the child um. Anyways, So speaking of the Romans, they
enjoyed meat pies during the dessert course, so pie was
still a dessert for them, but it was it was meaty,
not not berry ish um and the first published Roman
pie recipe was for goat, cheese and honey pie, which
to me actually sounds incredible. Yeah, that sounds very good.
(06:40):
And Kato the Elder, for instance, wrote about the most
popular pie of his time, which was called placenta. Placenta pie.
You read about this in day Agricultura. And I don't
have the recipe for placenta in front of me, but
I believe it is one of those savory pies that
(07:00):
would have come out during the Secoon di mensa or
that dessert course. And I can only imagine the visual
now being created in listeners minds by the two words
plasent a pie. Well, I know what's being created in mine. Well,
so anyway, um, let's let's travel to England in the
twelfth century up pies. That's when pies originally appeared. And
(07:24):
of course they were spelled very early English e with
a y instead of an eye, and they were predominantly
meat pies. We really don't get into sweet fruity pies
until a lot later and during the Middle Ages. The
pie crust, like I was saying earlier, was more of
a baking dish. It was kind of a container and
food preserver, and it was so sturdy that cooks actually
(07:46):
might have reused it from time to time. Yeah, there's
some medieval text talking about how uh, the poorer masses
might have gotten the discards of this really thick, almost
an edible pie crust from wealthier people's pies. But this
was because of how meat was cooked at the time.
(08:08):
It was cooked on an open spit, which rendered it
drier and smaller because all those juices were being released,
and so people started wrapping it up to yeah, to
keep that almost like a pot pie, to keep all
that that meaty, juicy goodness inside. And they called this
(08:28):
bake meat m et And so for hundreds of years,
this primitive pie crust was really the only type of
baking dish available. And fun fact, because it really served
as a dish for your food rather than something that
would enhance the flavor of say a dessert, the crust
(08:49):
of pie was referred to as a coffin. M hmm, yeah,
that's weird and morbid. Well, because at that time, coffin
simply denoted baskets. Yeah sure right, Um well, often these
meaty pies were made using foul and the legs this
is I just the legs were left to hang over
(09:12):
the side of the dish and used as handles, which
also indicates how tough those pie p y e crusts
were at the time. Um. But when we move into
the fourteenth century, by this point the Oxyford English Dictionary
notes that pie had become a popular word, so clearly
(09:34):
you know people were eating pie. There was a lot
of pie going around. And then in the sixteenth century
in England we have the emergence of fruit pies or
tarts also called pasties. And I love this English tradition
credits the making of the first cherry pie to Queen
Elizabeth the first Is she the type? Is she the
(09:56):
type true of made of pie? I don't see Queen
Elizabeth the verse making a pie at all. I don't either,
But I mean, I guess those are the kinds of
benefits you get if you are a queen. People just
say you do marvelous things such as make the first
cherry pie. Yeah, And I would have asked, Queen Elizabeth,
I would have accepted that compliment, and I would have saiden. Indeed,
(10:17):
these days, if you were queen, your your special thing
would probably be in contemporary terms of like Queen Caroline, you,
oh yes, you invented working. Of course she took the
first selfie. You're exactly right. I actually take credit for
T working anyway, Um and T working selfies. That's right. So,
(10:41):
speaking of pie events in the sixteenth century, apple pie
is mentioned in the fifty nine poem by Our Green
Thy breath is like the steam of apple pies, hot
cinnamon breath. Basically, um, but pies all so took a
weird turn around this time as well, because there was
(11:05):
a meat pie craze. This was described in an article
in The l A Times talking about the history of
pot pies, and it mentions that a mid sixteenth century
cookbook included a recipe for a and just vegetarians and
vegans listening, you might want to put down your headphones
right now because it was a five bird pie in
(11:28):
which each bird was stuffed inside the other bird, and
then all of that wrapped up in in a pie.
So like the predecessor to a tur duck in yes,
but pie, but pie, but that could only be topped
by pies that would contain live birds and animals. This
(11:52):
was like a really fun party trick for super rich people.
They would say, make me a pie with with live snakes,
and sorry of it. Yeah, like Indiana gents. Um. Well
at least it wasn't monkey brains, I guess. But I
mean they also had people popping out of pies. Yeah,
I mean the we think of like the cheesy woman
(12:13):
popping out of a cake today, But people did pop
out of these pies. They did not go through the oven.
But yeah, there are stories about like little people popping
out of pies and then serving as the court jester,
or a young woman who popped out of a pie
and she was bound to symbolize like the religious constraints
of of the pope. You know, they got elaborate with
(12:35):
these pies. Yeah, that whole nursery rhyme about a sing
a song of sixpence that talks about how many four
blackbirds baked in a pie That is in reference to
these quote unquote surprise pies that are full of surprises,
and by surprises live animals and people. Well, so do
you eat? Was there anything once the birds flew out
(12:57):
of the pie? Was there anything to eat in it?
Because I'd be afraid they were just be a lot
of bird Do do inside of it? Well? Probably if
you were at a feast hosted by someone as wealthy
as to have one of these surprise pies I'm imagining.
And also because like medieval tapestries would show this that
there would be a table before you laden with other dishes.
(13:17):
So maybe it's you know that sounds delicious, Yeah, minus
the birds that are flying, minus minus the bird poop
from all of those. But that's a general life policy, yes, yes, well,
(13:39):
so speaking of cakes, also, cakes were not the original
wedding food. Before wedding cakes, bride pies were popular in
England the seventeenth century. Bride pies were probably actually savory
rather than sweet, and there was a tradition of putting
a glass ring inside them and whatever woman got a
piece with the ring was said to be the next bride.
(14:02):
Also sounds dangerous, uh, in terms of tooth chipping. Well,
judging by how fast I tend to eat pastries and pies,
I would probably suck that sucker down. You just swallow it. Yeah,
oh okay. But we have that shift though toward the
popularity of the wedding cake, as well as the tradition
(14:24):
of the white wedding dress with the marriage of Queen
Victoria to Prince Albert in eighteen forty. But One of
the reasons too, why you would have savory bride pies
as opposed to wedding cakes is because of the price
of sugar. The price of sugar was very high, um.
But Queen Victoria had a nine foot tall wedding cake
(14:46):
that I believe waged five pounds um. But a lot
of this was the product of people donating goods to
this royal wedding feast, because even for a queen, all
that sweet cake would have been such an exorbitant expense. Also,
(15:07):
you know when when the English colonists moved over to America,
they brought the pie tradition with them. This is coming
again from the American Pie Council in the New York
Times and Time magazine. The colonists basically eight pie out
of necessity because it was an incredibly calorie dense food
and like we said, it could preserve quite a few
(15:28):
of their food items. Yeah. And Andrew F. Smith, who's
a food historian and author, said that the crust was
a bit of a problem because there were none of
the Old World grains. But if settlers had a pie
tin and maze that worked. And he talks about how
pies use less flour than bread and could be easily
and cheaply baked. And again though these early American pie
(15:53):
crusts weren't so much intended to be eaten as designed
to hold the filling. During the bay A King and
during the American Revolution, the term crust was used instead
of coffin. So we're still having evolution of pie making,
even as the crust part is still not so much delectable. Well,
(16:16):
and plus, I mean, pie was your handy dandy finger
food because before the mid mid eighteen hundreds, most Americans
didn't have forks. We went for a long time in
our nation's history without having many forks. So we were
a nation founded upon hot pockets ascension. Yeah, I think
(16:36):
that we. Yes, this episode is brought to you by
hot pockets. Now. Even though most Americans didn't have forks
before the mid nineteenth century, what we did have, though
was pumpkin pie. Because the first recipe known recipe at
least for pumpkin pie was written in the seventeenth century
(16:57):
in England, and it was really just like, hey, we've
got the squash, spice it up, put it in one
of your coffins, and bought a boom. You've got pumpkin pie.
But then when we come over to the America's it
wasn't popularized over here until the early eighteen hundreds. Yeah,
it originated from the delectable British spiced and boiled squash. Boiled,
(17:21):
they boiled it. Oh, we get a soft in it somehow. Well,
I guess, yeah, yeah, you're you're not wrong. Um. But
apple pie another another favorite. It's an old World fruit
introduced by the colonists, and apple pies could be saved
over the winter and ice houses, so it was a
great sweet, as we said, calorie riffic treat that they
(17:43):
could rely on to get them through long cold winters. Yeah.
But speaking of that sweet treat, one of the appeals
of an apple pie maybe was that it was naturally sweet,
because again, these old World pies would not have had
the benefit of sugar because again the price of sugar
was so high for so long, so instead of using sugar,
(18:06):
the initial pie of sweeteners would have been things like
maple syrup and molasses. Although once the price of sugar
started to drop in the United States in the mid
eighteen hundreds, you have more and more sweeter pies take over.
Because in sevente a cookbook from the time listed only
three types of sweet pies, but then by the late
(18:27):
eighteen hundreds you only have still eight types of sweet pies.
But by nineteen forty seven, the modern Encyclopedia of Cooking
lists sixty five different varieties of sweet pies. Yeah, and
that Graham cracker crust that my mother buys from the
grocery store to use in my father's weird jello lemon
(18:48):
ice box pies. It's infinitely easier than a pastry cut crust.
But it's relatively new, and it didn't come around until
about the nineteen thirties, and it was it was very
controversial among pie people. But I'm gonna go ahead and
say it. A Graham cracker crust is just so good. Well,
I think in my mind a Graham cracker crust is
(19:09):
second only to an Oreo crust. Oh, I agree with
you there. Yeah, that's another thing about my signature French
silk pie. I'll make an Oreo crust for it. Well. No,
my my aunt every year makes for Thanksgiving. Her specialty
is making a cheesecake, a beautiful plain cheesecake with an
Oreo crust, and it is I could eat the whole thing.
But here is here's a fun fact about American pie traditions.
(19:34):
Because the most popular pie in the United States is
the apple pie, there's a whole saying of as American
as apple pie. We've got bye bye, I'm miss American pie.
You know, we're all about apple pie over here. But
it was not America's first beloved pie. In fact, George
(19:54):
Washington himself was not an apple pie guy so much
as a sweet eat red pie, which means that old
Martha Washington because this was in one of her rescue books.
She liked to make a sweet red pie pie for
Georgie boy. But sweetbreads are not so sweet as savory
(20:14):
because they are animal intestines. Yeah, like organ meats. Oh
what's worse? Birds popping out of your pie or organ meats? Well,
I will at least you wouldn't have to eat the
empty bird crust thing crust pie. So contrary to all
of this American lore about apple pies being the most
(20:35):
American thing, it was actually mince pie that was America's
number one treat during the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
and mince pie had some surprises in it, namely, rum yeah.
During prohibition. In fact, mince pie became sort of like
a bootleggers delight because, as pointed out in a great
(20:57):
article on the history of mince pie in The Chicago Reader,
a nineteen nineteen article in the Chicago Tribune reported that
the average alcohol content of canned mints like the filling,
the mince pie filling, the alcohol content was fourteen point
one two per cent. That's that's a heavy pie. Yeah,
(21:21):
that is a heavy pie. But before then, though, Americans
were already crazy about mince pie. I mean, what was
it there was Oh yeah, there was an eighteen eighty
article in the Montpellier Argus and Patriot that said, mince pie,
like masonry, arouses curiosity from the mystery attaching to it.
(21:41):
It's popularity shall never wane until faith is lost in sight.
That's how much we loved mince pie. Yeah, And the
guy and the reader was comparing the downfall, the fading
out of the mince pie popularity too, if we suddenly
just decided to stop eating cheeseburgers as a nation, Like,
(22:02):
it was that popular and that ingrained in our diet.
But it was also similar to us loving cheeseburgers, so much.
We also knew that it wasn't so good for us
because mince pie is essentially a combination of animal fat
and sort of roast beef ish type of meat ground up,
(22:24):
and then you had a bunch of spices and obviously
a lot of booze if it's during prohibition, and you
bake it all together. And this guy in the Chicago
Reader baked his own mince pie and he enjoyed it
for its fatty, spicy goodness. Um. But there were some
strange things that were going along with this mince pie craze,
(22:45):
such as Albert Allen's mince pie defense in nineteen o seven. Yeah,
so Alan was in Chicago and he used mince pie
as a defense for fatally shooting his wife in nineteen
oh seven. He said that he was this mince pie
had created such bad nightmares that he was like gambling
and someone was trying to steal money from him, and
(23:06):
so he wanted in his dream, wanted to shoot the guy.
And he woke up and he had shot his wife dead. Yeah.
And there was another case where a guy on a
boat died and at first I thought there was foul play,
but it turned out that he had just eaten way
too much mince pie. And so for that reason, there
were all these warnings about the bizarre side effects of
(23:28):
eating mince pie, because apparently you couldn't eat just one piece.
For all these stories about people eating like entire mins pies, um,
and it led to things like, of course indigestion, but
also nightmares, hallucinations, and even just just death. Reading that
Chicago Reader article, and you know, reading all of the
(23:50):
ingredients that the guy used, I mean the amount of
animal fat, like weird, weird animal fat that he put
into it. I'm sure it did like instantly clog your arteries,
but I can also imagine how savory that probably is
as well. Again, vegetarians and vegans, I am sorry, but
(24:11):
the topic of our Thanksgiving podcast, The Mother of Thanksgiving herself,
Sarah Josepha Hale, makes an appearance in the mince pie craze. Yeah.
She wrote in eighteen forty one in the Victorian American
cookbook The Good Housekeeper the dangers of eating too much
of this pie, well pie in general, right, not just
(24:34):
mince pie. Um. She talked about how people of delicate
constitutions um should not eat pie because it would injure them,
and that the nature of pastry is just indigestible, and
so she said, it would really be a great improvement
in the matter of health if people would eat their
delicious summer fruits with good light bread instead of working
(24:54):
up the flour with water and butter to a compound
that almost defies the digestive powers and baking their in
the fruits till they lose nearly all their fine original flavor.
So Americans have been panicking about the national diet for ever,
it seems like yeah, well, especially since they tied it
into like doing crazy things like eating poorly and drinking
(25:15):
too much made you just act like a crazy person. Well,
and also at the turn of the century there was
this movement towards more exercise for people focusing on diet.
I mean, speaking of Graham crackers, you have the invention
of the graham cracker that was supposed to be you know,
that your staple food that you kind of lived off
up to be healthier. So men spies bore some of
(25:39):
the brunt for that. And also just at that time,
people were making a lot of pies because for so
long it was the standard way that we ate food. Um,
but piemaking did go through a twentieth century decline because
of things like women entering the workforce, and so we
(26:01):
didn't have all that time to make pies. I know,
I can't imagine. I can't imagine the amount of time
dedicated to cooking all of these meals every day, cooking
elaborate pies from scratch. Um. Piemaking did rebound a little
bit after World War Two because modern food advances appeared
that made pie making easier. You have things like shortening,
(26:23):
You have ready made crusts, box mixes, and instant pudding.
You have refrigeration. Although all of those post World War
two innovations that were so time changing and revolutionary in
those kitchens at the time would now be very much
looked down upon by modern piemakers who are all about
going old school with no shortening and using good butter
(26:47):
and flour. Um. And apparently there was in the nineteen
eighties a pie revival, it's according to the History kitchen.
And I feel like pie making and baking is really
regaining a lot of attention today as well. But it's
funny to look back and see that the most popular
(27:08):
pies in our country still hearken back to those earlier
eras of needing to preserve food, living off of the land,
needing to have something to do with strange confounding gourds
like pumpkins, because, according to a two thousand eight survey
from the American Pie Council and Crisco, of Americans prefer
apple pie, followed by pumpkin at thirteen pecan at twelve,
(27:32):
banana cream at ten percent, and cherry at nine percent.
What I want to know is where are the key
lime pie lovers? Hello? Are you out there? Because I'm
sitting here because and I love a key lime piel
and pie. Maybe they had weird stipulations about the ingredients.
I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, but
I will say that cherry pie always makes me think
(27:54):
of twin peaks as well, and it makes me crave
cherry pie. God, I just want pie, Caroline, I know,
I really just want a lot of food. Right now,
I'm I'm yeah, it's pie hour and by that I
mean lunchtime. Um, but we've got to now talk about
gender and pie because there is a funny thing about
(28:16):
pie wherein you don't see a lot of culinary evolution.
We're still eating the same pies that our forefathers and
four mothers were eating, and in a similar kind of way,
pie making, the act of making a pie is still
very much linked specifically to the female experience. Absolutely. I mean,
(28:39):
you know, back in the day, that's that's who was
in the kitchen making those pies, whether it was from
scratch or whether it was using those modern pie advances.
And in two thousand eight Pie Slice of Life Survey
Man two thousand eight was a big year for pie surveys.
I was conducted by Schwann's Consumer Brands of North America.
They asked survey respondents which mother would make the best pie,
(29:05):
because obviously they you know, wouldn't be which person It
would have to be a stereotypical TV mom. Yeah, of course. Well,
so respondents said that Carol Brady of the Brady Bunch
of People picked her to make the best pie out
of all the TV moms, followed by the Cosby Shows
Claire Huxtable with and to that, I say, please, Clare
(29:25):
Exetable doesn't have time to make a pie. She's a lawyer.
I was thinking the same thing. Well anyway, coming in
third with sixteen percent, was desperate Housewives Brie van de
Camp and Everybody Loves Raymonds Deborah Barone with We should
also know, though, that the same survey did also ask
who makes the best pie. The number one answer was mom,
(29:48):
Number two was well, your grocery store. A number three
was grandma. So again we have, uh, you know, women
making the pies. And there is a book called Can
She Bake a cheer Ry Pie? American Women and the
Kitchen in the twentieth Century by Mary Drake mcpheely, and
she talks about how in the rural America of the past,
(30:11):
a woman's reputation might be attached to her piemaking skills.
And she talks about this folk song called Billy Boy,
which I had forgotten that I knew. We used to
sing it when I was a kid, And there's this
verse about how well can she make a cherry pie?
Charming Billy because he's talking about this amazing woman that
he met, and it's like, well, yeah, she might so
(30:33):
be great and really pretty, but can she bake you
a pie? And he's like, yes, she can make a pie.
She's the apple of my eye. And then they're like, okay,
in that case, Billy, go ahead. Marry this woman, thank God,
because who cares about any other skills? Yeah? Um. But
even though as home cooking became less essential, mcpheeley says,
(30:55):
piemaking continued to be seen as a measure of a
woman's true all you. Yeah, I mean I think, I think, uh,
women are kind of getting the chaft there. If our
our skills and our value is based on our our
cooking ability. Although I mean, you know, like my mother
and in our house has always done all of the cooking,
(31:16):
it just seems like it's more of more of the
woman's domain. And much like Sarah Josefa Hale wanted Thanksgiving,
for instance, to serve as a time for women to
show off their culinary skills and really be able to
get in there and celebrate a holiday. For once, pies
were kind of that bump up to. It was like,
(31:37):
you know, show off your skills with lattice designs, crazy things,
with crazy pastry shapes and things. Yeah. I feel like
pie making is deceptively difficult, because I've tried to make
a number of pies and honestly, one of the reasons
why I make French silk pie is because it's so simple.
You literally melt chocolate, melt butter, put in a bunch
(32:01):
of sugar, and mix it until it's smooth and poured
into an oreo shell or whatever gonna shell you want.
But to make a fruit pie one that has that thick,
but gooey, perfect filling, and to do something like a
lattice work, I have tried and failed so many times,
(32:21):
and it might taste okay, But to make a pie
that looks good and taste good is such a challenge.
And I feel like we always think that cakes are
so impressive because you they have to rise and they're
these these creations are almost like just like the huge
towers and you have the frosting and all the stuff
that's going on, whereas pies might look so simple to
(32:45):
pull off. But I can see how, in the complexity
of actually making pies, how that translates to being this
sort of milestone culinary task historically for women, because like, well,
if you can make a pie, then you must be
good at other things well. And I mean even the
(33:08):
act of baking is celebrated by some as a feminist act.
Nigella Lawson, famous TV cook, got slammed for saying that
baking is a feminist act. She said, baking is the
less applauded of the cooking arts, whereas restaurants are a
male province to be celebrated. There's something intrinsically misogynistic about
decrying a tradition because it has always been female. I'm
(33:31):
not being entirely facetious when I say it's a feminist tract.
But speaking of feminism and pie making, we did find
a paper that looked into dessert making not so much
as a culinary action, what how that relates to women's
gender roles, but how we refer to women often in
(33:54):
terms of pie and other sweets. This was a paper
by Caitlin Hines called Rebaking the Pie but Woman as
dessert metaphor, and she talks about how, for instance, by
eighteen sixty four, the word tart, which is a type
of pie, it had the slang definition of a term
of approval to a young woman for whom some attraction
(34:16):
is felt. And you know, here women being referred to
as slices of pie or slices of cake, which Hinz
talks about how that implies objectification, sexual consumption, and that
like pie, women are a simply meant for sharing. Yeah,
she writes as desserts, women can be bought, sold, eaten,
elaborately decorated, admired for their outward appearance, dismissed as sinful
(34:40):
and decadent, etcetera, etcetera. And she cites the late Alan
Dundee's who was a UC Berkeley antropology professor, and basically
he discusses the socially sanctioned saccharine quality of females, which
is confirmed later in life by such terms of endearment
a sweetheart, honey bunch, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so basically,
you know, saying that these terms, these sugary terms, are
(35:05):
a way to dismiss women, kind of in one fell swoop.
But I mean, the thing is that reading this paper
about women as dessert metaphors, like I understand it, there's
obviously a lot of power in language. And when you
stop and think about the terms and the slang that
we used to refer to people who are not exactly
like ourselves, you can uncover some problematic things in that.
(35:31):
But with this whole conversation about piemaking and whether or
not it might be wrong to call someone sweetie pie,
I think I don't think that that that's the issue.
I don't see anything wrong with you know, women making pies.
I love to make pies. I love to eat pies. Um.
I don't know. It's like where I feel like when
(35:53):
in reading that kind of uh analysis, that kind of
really specific analysis on the intersection of pies and desserts
and feminism, what did you think was it? Is it
kind of too much at that point? I I mean
I tried to keep an open mind reading that paper, um,
(36:13):
because I see what she's getting at as far as
using terminology, using slang to dismiss women or or somehow
reduce them. Um. But yeah, I mean it's it's it's
the paper talking about women as pastry. But that ties
perfectly back to what Nigella Lawson was saying in terms
(36:34):
of don't dismiss baking as a less legitimate or respectable
form of a culinary art compared to something like molecular gastronomy,
something that seems you know, more scientific, um or or
more male you know. Um. So it's fascinating when you
sit and think about the gender politics tied up with pie,
(36:57):
because even today it's still considered a female province. The
making of the pie There was this blog post over
at Chow from two thousand seven talking about cookbook that
was put out at the time by Patti Pinner called
Sweetie Pies an Uncommon collection of womanish observations with pie,
(37:18):
and the blogger Kara's Wairo talks about how the entire
cookbook is a gender specific spin on the art of
pie baking. Yeah, she quotes Pinner who says, uh that
she is a descendant of that generation where a woman's appearance, manner,
and domestic prowess were synonymous with her feminine identity and
(37:41):
that kind of uh in light of talking about baking
and a woman's place and feminism and everything. I mean,
that's kind of that takes you aback for a minute. Um,
But I think Penner is celebrating pies and baking and
just that that kind of artistry that goes along with it.
Is weird that she said that she's a descendant of
(38:03):
that generation where you're feminine identity was synonymous with your
domestic prowess. But it's I feel like we have more
maybe freedom to reclaim a lot of that stuff these days.
There has been a revival of domestic arts, whether it
is piemaking, or baking or knitting or canning, whatever it
(38:26):
might be. I feel like a lot of women are
circling back to these kinds of slower ways of making
things in the home. Yeah. Well, I mean yeah, we've
talked about stuff like that before, like even with our
Manic Pixie dream Girl podcast, you know where it's like, well,
you shouldn't dis you know, girly things or baking or
(38:47):
cupcakes just because they make you think of some type
of woman that you don't like, or you know whatever.
We shouldn't dismiss people's pastimes or eating habits or baking
habits just because we also tend to associate them with
a bygone era exactly. Yeah. And by the same token,
we shouldn't dismiss maybe men who want to get in
(39:09):
on the pie baking game. I for one would love
it if my boyfriend never wanted to make me a pie,
I should just ask him. I bet he just baked
me a pie. Bake me a pie, please, sir um.
But speaking of which, there was a recent post by
this guy, Brian O'Neal over the Post Gazette and m
(39:29):
He talks about how he made his very first pie.
He was like, I know, This probably doesn't sound like
a big deal to you, but he says, quote, I
was born in ninety six, a member of one of
the last generations for which gender roles were rigidly defined,
at least in my house, and it was a celebratory
act for him. He was like, I made an apple
(39:50):
pie and it was delicious, and I didn't make the
crust myself, but I still felt pretty cool doing this thing.
That would have felt like a subversive act for a
man of my generation. Yeah. I mean if he had
done that, if he had been that age the year
he was born making that pie, people would be like,
what are you? Why are you doing that? Let your
(40:10):
wife do that? Why are you cooking that pie? Where's
your Betty Draper? You need some scotch go sit down. Um.
But speaking of male bakers, you know now we want
to hear from you, guys. We want to know whether
or not you're baking pies, ladies, anybody else. What's your
favorite pie? Do you enjoy piemaking or are you more
(40:31):
more of a cake person like Caroline. I'm not gonna judge, really,
I I don't discriminate against any sweets, but you know what,
it's so there are plenty of people who prefer the
cake over the pie. I just I'm just more in
the pie camp, which may or may not have been
part of my interests of pursuing this podcast topic. Um
(40:52):
but yet again, I do feel like pie is one
of those topics where it seems so simple and unassuming,
but when you start unpacking the history, there's so much. Yeah.
I mean it fed entire cultures for centuries. It was
the way that people sustain themselves. That it was brought
(41:12):
to the New world, you know, it was entertainment. It
was Yeah, so many different things. And bride pie I
like that idea. Screw wedding case, savory bread. Bye, I'll
haven't mid spie my wedding. Please, So send us all
of your pie related thoughts and any pictures of pie.
I'll appreciate that any pie recipes send them all our way,
(41:37):
because it's the holidays and it's time to eat, folks.
So email us. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com is
where you can send your letters. You can also tweet us,
tweet us pie picks at Mom's Stuff podcast, or you
can also message us on Facebook and we've got a
couple of messages to share with you when we come
right back from a quick break and now back to
(42:07):
our letters. So we have a couple of letters here
from our episode on Fettion Affection Revolution, and this first
one is from Lisa. She writes, I am a plus
size woman, size twenty four, and I'm also a teacher
at a local high school. I've always been self conscious
about my weight because I haven't always been plus size.
(42:31):
I realized that I have a great power to influence
how young women see themselves just by the way that
I talk about and dress myself. Can it be hard
to find fashionable plus size clothes? You bet you, But
the hunt is with it for me, and I am
still young seven and I know that my students are
looking at me as a role model. What kind of
message would I send if I work clothes it didn't
(42:52):
fit properly, baggy or too tight, or if I hunched
and was constantly trying to hide my body. I'm a fun, smart,
likable payer sent in My weight has nothing to do
with that. I try to look my best every day
so my students see that it doesn't matter what size
you are if you love yourself and love others. I
want to show them a woman who is not ashamed
of herself in any way, a woman who knows it's
(43:14):
what's inside your head and your heart that matters. And
how do I accomplish that by my demeanor, my carriage,
and my style. Let's stop worrying about our size and
worry more about our self worth and the messages we
are sending to the next generation of women. Here here, Lisa,
good for you. Um I have a letter here from
Danielle about our Fatchion episode, and I just want to
(43:34):
say thank you for including the picture of your freaking
adorable dog. I squealed. Um. So, Danielle says, I'm an overweight,
twenty three year old woman and I have struggled with
finding cute clothes that are well made for years. I
am so glad that you did a podcast on the
world of Fatchan. And even though I'm a plus size woman,
I had never heard of the Fatchan movement. I don't
(43:56):
know how that is even possible, but I loved it.
Although I want the women who is trying to get
healthier and work out a few times a week, which
is when I tend to listen to you a podcast,
I do love being able to find clothes that fit
my body now so that I can still look and
feel good while trying to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Also,
you ask for places to find cute plus sized clothing,
and one site that I found that I really like
(44:18):
is simply be dot com. I just got a Christmas
dress from there and I'm eagerly awaiting. It's a rival
so awesome. Thank you for your letter, Daniel, and thanks
to everybody who's written in. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send your letters. You can
follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast, find us
on Facebook and like us while you're at it. We're
on Tumbler as well at stuff Mom Never Told You
(44:40):
dot tumbler dot com, and also on Instagram. Oh please
instagram us your pie pictures. We are at stuff Mom
Never Told You. And last, but certainly not least, you
should head over to YouTube and check us out over
there too. We're at YouTube dot com, slash stuff Mom
Never Told You, and don't forget to subscribe for more
(45:03):
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