Biography Of Yummy Australian & American Pies

I love American and Australian pies. They may be world apart in flavour and ingredients, but the pie lovers just can’t do without them. And here comes a fascinating biography…

Pie is the latest in a series of small, engaging and beautifully illustrated books edited by food historian Ken Albala, who wrote last year’s entertaining Pancake, writes The Age.

“Janet Clarkson, a GP and lecturer in medicine at the University of Queensland, is also a culinary historian — and clearly has a great love of pies.

“The word ‘pie’ is richly evocative — even beyond the strictly culinary context. Instantly, for example, we may think of blackbirds, four and twenty of them; of kings and pocketsful of rye and childhood. Or perhaps Laurel and Hardy will come to mind with cream-pie fights, faces shocked and white-frosted.

“If we are Australian, we think of pies and sauce, footy and slurping the meat from under the steaming pastry lid; if American, it’s mom’s apple-pie — homely, hokey and sweet.

“Clarkson weaves these tales, with arch wit, into a splendid story: it is extraordinary how much food history reveals about our various cultures. She ends on a slightly wistful note: the great variety of pies we once cooked and enjoyed have largely disappeared from home and commercial kitchens.

“Encouragingly, she provides recipes from centuries past to entice us: among them, one of ‘apples and orenge pilles’ (1597), a curried fish pie (1827) and a lemon cream pie (1925).” More here…

Reference to “pyes” as food items appeared in England (in a Latin context) as early as the 12th Century, but no unequivocal reference to the item with which the article is concerned is attested in the Oxford English Dictionary until the 14th century. See here…