What is the history of apple pie?

Answer

English apple pie recipes go back to the time of Chaucer. A 1381 recipe lists the ingredients as good apples, good spices, figs, raisins and pears. (See an 18th century print of this 14th century recipe at the URL below.) The cofyn ingredient is a casing of pastry. Saffron was used for coloring the pie filling.

Most modern recipes for apple pie require an ounce or two of sugar, but the earliest recipes do not. There are two possible reasons:

Cane sugar imported from Egypt was not widely available in fourteenth-century England, where it cost between one and two shillings a pound; one source claims that this is roughly the equivalent of US $100 per kg in today's prices.

Another reason for the absence of sugar in the recipe may suggest that, because refined sugar was a recent introduction from the Orient, the medieval English did not have quite as sweet a tooth as their descendants. Honey, which was much cheaper, is also absent from the recipe, and the 'good spices' and saffron, all imported, were as expensive and scarce as refined sugar. Despite the expense, refined sugar did appear much more often in published recipes of the time than honey, suggesting that it was not considered prohibitively expensive.

One combination of flavors common in the nineteenth century and earlier, which was referred to in English novels of the time, was apple pie and cheese (usually sharp cheddar cheese). This was because apples were not always sweet; the leading sweet variety, Red Delicious, wasn't developed until 1868. The sharpness of the cheese combines with the tartness of the apple and so produces an appealing taste. While its popularity has waned as modern pies have become sweeter, some people still enjoy this combination. In Yorkshire, for example, apple pies are baked with cheddar cheese or served with a hard crumbly cheese such as Cheshire alongside.

Dutch apple pie (appeltaart or appelgebak) recipes also go back a long way. A painting dated 1626 features such a pie. Dutch recipes typically call for flavorings such as cinnamon, lemon juice, raisins and even icing. Dutch apple pies are usually decorated in a lattice style.

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