Monday, November 1, 2021

Pie History by Maya Corrigan - Potluck Monday

A 15th century feast with a large pie
15th century feasts featured savory pies 
Lifting the lid off a coffin was a pleasant experience in England during the Middle Ages. A coffin or coffyn referred to a container made of pastry, a precursor of the modern pie crust, and food was served in the coffin it had been cooked in. The first printed use of the word coffin as a box for a corpse appeared later, in the 16th century.

Historians trace pies back to ancient times. The Greeks wrapped dough made of flour and water around meat to seal in the juices. The Romans continued that tradition and spread it across Europe. The word pie or pye supposedly comes from magpie, the bird that collects odds and ends of its nest, just as cooks put everything they had into a pie. A recipe from 1450 mentions beef, hens, rabbits, suet, egg yolks, dates, and prunes as some of the ingredients in a single high and hearty “pye.”

Public Domain Nursery Rhyme Illustration  
The Italian Banquet, a book from the late 16th century, refers to a pie filled with live birds. To make this showy treat, the baker put a fist-sized hole in the bottom of the pastry coffin and sealed up the opening. After cooking and cooling the pie, the baker stuffed live birds in the hole, so that when it was cut for serving, the birds would fly out.

The crust of these savory pies had to be dense enough to withstand hours of heat. The coffin served as a casserole dish, making meat more tender and delicious than hunks of dry roasted meat. But the pastry itself was tasteless and too hard and thick to chew.

As sugar and fat became more available and affordable, the dough containers morphed into the edible pie crusts we know today. By the time the English established colonies across the Atlantic, less heavy dough, a short crust, was common with sweet as well as savory fillings. According to Matt Siegel in The Secret History of Food, the scarcity of wheat in the New England colonies meant that cooks had to stretch the pastry for pies so it became thin and flaky. It's still true that British pie crusts tend to be thicker and denser than American crusts.
 
Mark Twain offers a snarky “Recipe for an English Pie” in his 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad: “Take a sufficiency of water and a sufficiency of flour, and construct a bullet-proof dough. ...Toughen and kiln-dry in a couple days ... Fill with stewed dried apples; aggravate with cloves, lemon-peel, and slabs of citron; add two portions of New Orleans sugars, then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy.”

Hard as he is to please, Twain would approve of the pie recipes on Mystery Lovers' Kitchen. Here are a few for you to savor:

Cleo Coyle’s perfect sweet pie crust 

Lucy Burdette's classic apple pie

Chicken Pot Pie by Mary Jane Maffini

Maya Corrigan’s Mango Key Lime Pie


Note that you can still sign up for a free book by leaving a comment on yesterday's post.

Pie is my favorite dessert, but I've never made a savory pie. Are you a pie-lover?


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The title of the fourth book in my Five-Ingredient Mystery series derives from Edgar Allan Poe's story about a murder, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The victim and suspects in The Tell-Tale Tarte are all inspired by Poe: an actor famed for his one-man Poe show, an author who riffs on Poe stories, a professor who specializes in Poe, and an aspiring writer and Poe lookalike.

When café manager Val Deniston serves a French apple pie, a tarte Tatin, at a book club dinner, the dessert reveals a fraud, embroiling her and her grandfather in the investigation of a murder. The search for the killer takes Val and Granddad to the home of a bestselling author, Rick Usher. Stranded there by an ice storm, they spend a harrowing night in the “House of Usher.” Then, in the shadow of Poe’s tomb, they try to prevent another murder and mete out some POE-etic justice.

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mysteries featuring café manger Val and her live-wire grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Maya lives in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Before writing crime fiction, she taught American literature, writing, and detective fiction at Northern Virginia Community College and Georgetown University. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website to sign up for her newsletter. One subscriber wins a book each time a newsletter goes out. Check out the easy recipes, mystery history and trivia, and a free culinary mystery story on the website.


Book covers of the 7 Five-Ingredient Mysteries by Maya Corrigan


Happy Fall! 🍁🍂🍁

 




22 comments:

  1. Wow! That's quite a history.
    I like pies, both sweet and savory.
    The show Pie in the Sky made me crazy wanting fancy meat pies!

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    1. Thank you for commenting, Libby. I saw a few episodes of Pie in the Sky. Lots of fun.

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  2. We love pies! The one I get requested the most to make is Coconut Cream Pie. Hubby loves my pecan pie which I bake in a deep dish pie crust, double the gooey part and put a single pie amount of pecans on top. The trick is to cook slow and low to get the filling done and pecans toasted just right. Talk about rich! One friend even puts vanilla ice cream on top - not that's rich. LOL

    Loved the wonderful pie history. Thanks! Always love to learn new things.
    2clowns at arkansas dot net

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    1. Thank you for commenting, Kay. Food history fascinates me. My family loves pecan pie. Fortunately, they aren't particular about the recipe!

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  3. Yes, indeed I am very much a pie lover! I like meat pies & enjoy making English meat pies & empanadas. The combination of the crust with a savory filling is SO good but we also like fruit pies, chocolate pie, lemon pie & coconut cream pie with mile high meringue. Then there's apricot fried pies! lnchudej@yahoo.com

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    1. Thanks for commenting, Linda. I haven't eaten any English meat pies, but I love empanadas! ~Maya

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  4. What a great essay, Maya!

    Pie is more appealing to me than cake, especially fruit pies. But I also love the savories: pot pie (chicken or turkey), tomato pie, onion pie, and mushroom tart.

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    1. Thanks for your comment, Karen. I haven't eaten onion pie since we returned from my husband's army stint in Germany. When we lived there, we enjoyed a specialty of the Fall season--new wine and onion pie.

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  5. This is wonderful, Maya! Pie. Yes, I love pie.

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  6. I am a pie lover and yes we have made several apple pies also we make cheesecake on a normal basis as the neighbors love it and we give them half. peggy clayton ptclayton2@aol.com

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    1. Thanks for your comment, Peggy, and I wish you were my neighbor! ;-)

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  7. I do love pie. My favourite is tortierre. My father was from Montreal and we always had this savory pie on Christmas Eve. This year we had our own apples for pie. What a treat!
    sandra shenton 13 at gmail dot com

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    1. Thank you for commenting, Sandra. I had to look up "tortierre." It sounds delicious!

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  8. Besides the sweet ones,I grew up eating crawfish pie, Natchitoches meat pies, tomato pie, then expanded to all the others, like chicken pot pie, Shepherd's pie, tamale pie, empanadas, Jamaican patties, you name it. Lately with my bad arm/hand problems I usually rely on store bought dough and puff pastry. Still all good!

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    1. Thanks for your comment, Lynn. Even without a bad arm, I rely on puff pastry!

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  9. What a terrific culinary history lesson, Maya--thank you!

    I had a dream some years back about baking a pie with live birds in it, and when I awoke, it seemed so real that (in my still-half-asleep mode) I pondered how I could actually make one. And now I know!

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  10. If you consider a Shepherds pie savory then I guess I have made both sweet and savory pies. I really enjoy your 5 ingredient cozies and the recipes they inspire. I am equally excited to read the next one, the relationship between Val and her Granddad is a great one!

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    1. Thank you, Tracy! I've never made Shepherds Pie, but I've eaten it in restaurants and enjoyed it!

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