Another thing great about America is our apple pie. It’s what our country and flag are “as American as”, right? Since the earliest colonial days, apple pies have been enjoyed in America for breakfast, as an entrée and for dinner. Colonists wrote home about them and foreign visitors noted apple pie as one of our first culinary specialties.

We’ve all heard or used the expression, “As American as apple pie” to refer to things we know to have originated in America or otherwise associate with Americana. So you might be surprised to learn that apple pie may not have actually been invented here, at least according to Wikipedia and a few other sources that point out that apple trees weren’t indigenous to the colonies and had to be imported as saplings, and that Europeans made all sorts of pies before the colonies were even established.

“We may have taken (apple pie) to our hearts, but it is neither our invention nor even indigenous to our country. In fact, the apple pie predates our country’s settlement by hundreds of years,” writes Lee Edwards Benning in Cook’s Tales.

Yet there are American apple-pie recipes, both manuscript and printed, from the eighteenth century, and it has since become a very popular dessert. And if the food-loving Pennsylvania Dutch people didn’t invent apple pie, they certainly perfected it. Evan Jones in American Food, The Gastronomic Story writes:

“Some social chroniclers seem convinced that fruit pies, as Americans now know them, were invented by the Pennsylvania Dutch. Potters in the southeastern counties of the state were making pie plates in the early eighteenth century, and cooks had begun to envelop with crisp crusts every fruit that grew in the region. ‘It may be,’ Frederick Klees asserts, ‘that, during the Revolution, men from the other colonies came to know this dish in Pennsylvania and carried this knowledge back home to establish apple and other fruit pies as the great American dessert.’”

Personally, I stand with Jones. Europeans may have invented something they called apple pie, but I’d wager that the colonists, particularly the Pennsylvania Dutch, reinvented whatever it was and made it as American as, well, apple pie! And whenever I enjoy a slice of warmed Dutch apple, usually with a dollop of vanilla ice cream on top, I heartily thank those early Dutch settlers!

I guess what I’m saying, in a somewhat roundabout way, is that I’m really proud of America and her wonderful all American apple pie. So the next time you refer to the cotton gin, the telephone, jazz, the iPod or any of the myriad things we Americans have invented throughout our short history, go ahead and say, with well deserved pride, that they’re “as American as apple pie” because, after all, they really are.

Check out the patriots taking this journey with me: JimK, Scott, Larry, Drumwaster, and Cosmicbabe.