General History

Every good story begins with the age old words "Once upon a time..."  Well, this is a story about pies so:

ONCE UPON A TIME...
There were no ovens.  There were kilns that baked clay, and then there were fires for cooking meat and baking bread on flagstones.  Well eventually some ingenious person decided to actually try baking BREAD in the kiln; and so the first oven was born.  People enjoyed this new invention, it really was quite useful; but their food lives were still not complete.  Meat could only be baked over the fire... and because of this all of those delicious juices would be lost to the flames.  People went on being all depressed about this, until one day someone gets this crazy idea to stick meat INTO the bread dough.  They act on this impulse, but dough with a chunk of meat in the center into the oven; and a while later they pulled out the world's first pie!  Everyone was THRILLED!  Because meat could now be cooked without all of those juices being lost, tons of people started to make pies.

During this time period the pretty much just used this bread (aka the pie crust) as their baking dishes... So anything baked in an oven was either bread (if it was empty) or pie (if there was something in it.)  These pies were amazingly useful.  Not only did they allow meat to be baked in an oven, because of their crusts (which were always several inches thick) they were ideal for carrying and storing food.  Sometimes food would be stored for up to a year as a meat pie!

Well, with these crusts being used as baking containers they weren't exactly the most delicious things.  In fact, the pies would have to be baked for so long (to insure that the meat inside was fully baked) that they were typically too hard to bother eating.  Since these crusts were inedible they were used in different ways.  Sometimes after eating all the filling out of a crust people would just fill the crust up again and stick it back in the oven.  Other times the crusts would be ground up and used as a thickening agent in stews.

A couple hundred years go by...  It actually isn't until the 14th Century has rolled around that pastry is invented.  Pastry requires three basic ingredients: wheat (oats and barley don't work as well), a solid fat (lard from a pig was best), and water.  The water and wheat would combine to form gluten, the structure that holds dough together, and the fat would help to create air pockets to give pastries their famous flakiness.  Well, in the 14th Century there is an area in North and Central Europe where there is plenty of wheat, fat, and water... and so pastry is born.  With the invention of pastry for the first time pie crusts are made to be edible.  During this time period it becomes popular in England for BIG meat pies to be made.  These pies tended to have very tall freestanding sides (and so they were still quite thick) specific instructions in the recipes called that the crusts be made "tender as ye maye."(27)

Gradually over time pies become more and more intricate.  The poor still live off basic pies made from whatever bread and meat they can find... The rich on the other hand begin to have their chefs create pies that are essentially works of art.  Instead of just giant slabs of meat making up the filling meat is minced into little squares before being pored into the crust.  Chefs also begin experimenting with custards and "wet" fillings such as stews and fruits.

In the 16th Century the idea of "sweet" pies is brought to England by the Arabs.  However, it is not until the 18th Century that this idea truly begins to take hold.  In America this progression happened slightly faster as Pilgrims, faced with the combination of plenty of apples and just enough wheat to make pies, begin the American tradition of Apple Pies in the 17th Century.

Across the centuries pie changed from being the staple of everyone's diet, to being a dessert in America and just another meal in any other country.  Despite this shift pies are still remembered fondly across the globe... for one reason or another.