Why Is Pie the Most Memorable Part of Thanksgiving Dinner?
The season’s favorite dessert requires time and attention to make, which may be why it’s the key to a great meal.
Thanksgiving is one of those times of year that inspires reflection. For some it is a moment to contemplate the meaning of family, or of America. But for me, there is a simpler message to take away: We should all have more pie in our lives.
What’s refreshing about Thanksgiving is that, for all the travel delays and the potential for family arguments, the focus is on the cooking for once. At Christmas, the feast easily gets overshadowed by the mountain of gifts. At Thanksgiving, by contrast, everyone recognizes that the food is what matters—or so it has always seemed to me (I am British but have eaten two decades of Thanksgiving dinners with American friends and family). For one brief moment in the year, food becomes the most important thing. Will the mashed potatoes be smooth enough? Is it worth experimenting with a different stuffing? And, crucially, is there enough pie?
Too many of us spend our lives in a state of pie deprivation, judging from the hunger with which the pies are greeted on a Thanksgiving table. Few things instill more of a sense of comfort than the sight of a golden-topped fruit pie just before you cut into it. The other great joy of Thanksgiving is having a wedge of leftover pie for breakfast the day after, especially if the fruit juices have seeped into the bottom layer of pastry, making a soggy contrast to the crisp top layer.
There have been times and places when eating pie was a daily occurrence for American families. Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the “Little House on the Prairie” series of books, describes the pies that featured as part of breakfast for her husband Almanzo on a farm in upstate New York in the late 1860s. Wilder writes that his regular breakfast included oatmeal with cream and buckwheat pancakes, but “best of all Almanzo liked the spicy apple pie, with its thick, rich juice and its crumbly crust.”
Thanksgiving aside, I don’t know anyone who regularly eats spicy apple pie for breakfast any more. This is a bit sad. Think of all that flaky joy we are forgoing. Yes, pie can be sugary, but it is no more so than the sweet, dessert-like items many of us regularly eat for breakfast. Why is a blueberry muffin a more common item than blueberry pie?
Maybe we think pies are dauntingly difficult to make. But actually they’re not, assuming you have a rolling pin, a pie dish and a decent recipe. (A good place to start is the new cookbook “365: A Year of Everyday Cooking and Baking” by Meike Peters, or else you could try the Food52 website.) If the pastry cracks before you add the filling, all you need to do is smooth over the gaps with a reserved piece of dough—a pro tip from baking blogger David Lebovitz.
If we wanted to be pedantic about it, many of the pies on the Thanksgiving table, such as pumpkin and pecan, are actually tarts rather than pies, because they only have a crust underneath, not on top. The pies baked by English settlers in the 17th century would have been fully encased in a layer of pastry called a “coffin,” which was often too thick and hard to eat. The coffin’s role was simply to protect the ingredients inside as they cooked, like a casserole dish. Pies in those days weren’t generally a dessert, but a substantial dish filled with meat and various seasonings, including dried fruit.
The word pie probably comes from “magpie,” the bird that collects a jumble of things, because early pies tended to contain a hodgepodge of random ingredients—some savory, some sweet. In “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons —the first cookbook written by an American, published in 1796—there is a recipe for a pie filled with apples, sugar, cinnamon, wine, raisins—and a pound of cow’s tongue. I doubt many households served that at Thanksgiving this year. Then again, some of Simmons’s pie recipes sound perfectly tasty. Her “Pompkin Pudding” is similar to our own pumpkin pie: a pint of stewed pumpkin mixed with eggs, molasses, allspice and ginger and baked in a crust.
Thanksgiving pies have a way of living on in memory long after the gravy and side dishes are forgotten.
Pies are “the holiday part of dinner,” wrote Jennie June Croly in her “American Cookbook” in 1866. By that time, the sweet pies we know and love were fully established. Croly offers recipes for custard pie and grape pie, rhubarb pie and coconut pie, cherry pie and lemon cream pie. She writes that pies should be “fruity in substance, fruity in flavor,” with a layer of pastry that’s not too thick. She even went so far as to suggest that a man who didn’t like pie was not to be trusted.
Thanksgiving pies have a way of living on in memory long after the gravy and side dishes are forgotten. A couple of years ago, I made a lattice-topped vanilla-scented apple pie and a pumpkin pie spiced with cloves and cinnamon for my American nieces for Thanksgiving. The following year, I planned to branch out and make an orange and cardamom tart instead. But my sister said that I had to make the pies exactly the same as the previous year, because the girls had been talking about them for months. I can’t pretend I wasn’t pleased by this (even though part of me really wanted to make and eat that orange tart).
A pie isn’t just any dessert. With its crust of buttery goodness, it is a sign that care has been taken. There is no mystery to making them, but they do require time and attention, two things that seem to be in short supply in most of our lives. I have a friend who crimps the edges of an apple pie as carefully and precisely as if she were a sculptor making a fine vase, giving it every ounce of her effort. It’s mesmerizing to watch.
I suspect that the single biggest reason we don’t make pies more often is that we feel we don’t have time. Yet there is something about the methodical process of fitting pastry into a dish that can actually make you feel less rushed and stressed (on the weekend, anyway). “Rest for at least an hour,” reads the instruction in most pie recipes. It’s referring to the pastry, but what if it also means you?
From the WSJ