Who Invented Pie?

Sweet or savory, a pie is a portable, calorie-dense, soul-warming dish that can be prepared from whatever ingredients are on hand. Over its long history, the pie started as a hard-shelled necessity, became a delicacy served by royal chefs and then took its place at the center of the family table.

As early as 6000 B.C., ancient Egyptians had the tools and ingredients to make primitive “galettes,” a type of open pie with a crust of ground wheat holding meat or honey. By the New Kingdom period (1550 to 1070 B.C.), the tomb walls of pharaohs like Ramses II depicted royal feasts and divine offerings that included round, flat, pie-like pastries sweetened with honey, nuts and fruit.

But it was the ancient Greeks and Romans who passed down the oldest known recipes for baked dishes encased in a crust. In 160 B.C., Cato the Elder recorded a recipe for one of Rome’s most popular pies, a savory cheesecake with the off-putting name placenta. (In Latin, placenta simply means “cake” and is derived from a Greek word meaning "flat" or "slab-like.") Some Roman cheese pies—also called libum—were wrapped in fig or grape leaves, but others were baked in a crust.

Pie crusts weren’t always meant to be eaten. Starting with the Romans and continuing through the Middle Ages, pie crusts were thick, inedible containers made of flour, water and sometimes fat, known as coffyns. In fact, the English word “coffin” was used to describe pie crusts centuries before it was connected to human burials.

“These thick, sturdy crusts were really meant as baking vessels to withstand long baking times and high-heat ovens,” says Rossi Anastopoulo, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: A History of America in 11 Pies. “And in many ways, they were also a handy, portable container, like early Tupperware.”

In her book, Pie: A Global History, Janet Clarkson contends that before cookware was oven-safe in the 16th century, “everything baked in an oven that was not bread was ‘pie.’” That’s because medieval cooks encased all kinds of ingredients—meats, seafood, vegetables and fruits—in a thick “coffin” of dough to seal in the juices and flavors while baking.

Coffin crusts were more than just baking dishes, though. They also helped preserve foods in an era before refrigeration. Cooks would pour rendered fat or melted butter through a hole in the crust that cooled to form an airtight seal. Stacks of meat pies could be packed into the hold of a ship for a long journey. Clarkson cites a recipe from 1695 for a wild boar pie sealed with butter that “will, if it be not set in a very moist place, keep a whole Year.”

While leftover coffin crusts soaked in meaty juices may have been food suitable for poor peasants, pie crusts weren’t widely eaten until the invention of pastry in the 14th century. A light and flaky pie crust requires soft, finely ground wheat flour and refined fats like lard or butter, ingredients that first came together in pastry-making centers like northern Italy before spreading to the rest of Europe and the British Isles.

The beloved Mother Goose nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” describes a pie made from “four and 20 blackbirds” which, when the pie is cut open by the king, “began to sing.” Did medieval European chefs really bake live animals in their pies? Not quite, explains Clarkson.

From the 14th through the 17th centuries, royal banquets included food-based entertainment called “sotelties.” Royal chefs competed to engineer the most elaborate sotelties, which often involved live animals popping out of large, prebaked pie crusts. And not just birds. Robert May’s The Accomplished Cook from 1660 suggested frogs, which would “make the ladies to skip and shreek.”

The richer the king, the bigger the pie and the stranger its contents. The 14th-century French Duke of Burgundy allegedly served a pie containing 28 live musicians. And in 1626, King Charles of England and his teenage queen, Henrietta Maria, cut into a cold pie to find a 7-year-old boy named Jeffrey Hudson who stood just 18 inches tall. Hudson, who was dressed in a miniature suit of armor, served Henrietta for 18 years as “the queen’s dwarf” and also her trusted adviser.

Sweet fruit pies weren’t a common menu item until refined sugar became a global commodity in the 16th century. Before that, fruit may have been an ingredient in a savory pie—adding a bit of tartness and sweetness to balance out meat and vegetable dishes—but not usually the star of the show.

That changed with Queen Elizabeth I, whose reign over England and Ireland not only brought the world the works of William Shakespeare, but also an iconic dessert. In the mid-1500s, the Tudor queen’s chef is said to have served her a sweet and tart cherry pie, among the earliest documented of its kind.

While sweet pies certainly existed in Britain before and after Elizabeth, it was savory pies that became a staple of English cuisine, including regional favorites like shepherd’s pie, handheld Cornish “pasties,” and stargazy pie, featuring whole sardines with their heads poking out of the crust.

Apples are not native to North America, says Anastopoulo, just “super-tart crabapples” that were no good for pie. Domesticated apple varieties were introduced by European settlers, who also brought their centuries-old pie-making traditions.

Colonial America embraced the fruit pie since sweeteners like maple syrup, cane sugar and molasses were ample and affordable. The very first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, contained two recipes for apple pie and two more for “pompkin” pie.

Rhubarb was originally a medicinal plant used as a laxative until cooks discovered how the mouth-puckering stalks mellow when boiled with sugar. In New England, where rhubarb was the first plant to emerge after a long winter, it was known simply as “pie plant.”

Although Americans have enjoyed a wide variety of pies—George Washington’s favorite was reportedly a gag-inducing sweetbread and oyster pie—apple pie is considered quintessentially American.

“Apple pie really came to be associated with American identity in the 20th century, prompted by wartime patriotism,” says Anastopoulo. During World War II, when American soldiers were asked what they were fighting for, they’d answer, “for mom and apple pie.” Charles Hurd, a New York Times reporter, once described a World War II veteran as “as American as apple pie,” and the culinary comparison stuck.