If there is a sweet that lives in my heart, it is the Apple Pie! The combination of baked apples with a generous amount  of cinnamon, all embraced by a light and fluffy short crust pastry, are the perfect combination to make me happy on a cold Fall afternoon!

And please, don’t come up with inventions and adaptations, because what I really like is the original pie! It is an incredible pie to share with family and friends, and so when i make it, i make it BIG!

You know that I like to know the story behind each recipe I bring to you. Its origins, curiosities, how it evolved over the time, so before we jump into the recipe let me tell you a little about the history of the famous Apple Pie.

Apple Pie is a dessert with an enormous popularity in the United States, but were the first European settlers who brought the recipe to North American lands. The first recipes of this pie date from medieval times.

“The typical American pie made from uncooked apples, fat, sugar, and sweet spices mixed together and baked inside a closed pie shell descends from fifteenth-century English apple pies, which, while not quite the same, are similar enough that the relationship is unmistakable.”

One of the first apple pie recipes appeared in England in 1390 and did not have any sugar, either in the filling or in the dough.

The big question is, “So why did the apple pie become an United States symbol?”

We already know that European settlers brought the recipe to the colonies, as well as the apples, which at that time did not exist in North America (only a few wild species extremely bitter which no one consumed). Of course that a recipe like this, easy, delicious and affordable, quickly made success and spread throughout American cuisine. During the Civil War, according to the book American Pie: an American Story, “both Union and Confederate troops scavenged for apples and commandeered the hearths—and flour bins—of white farmers and black tenants to bake pies.”

But it was only in the 20th that, through the media and the war, this dessert became a North American national symbol. The New York Times stated in 1902 that apple pie had become an “American synonym for prosperity”, and the mythical quote “as American as apple pie”, used by the journalist Charles Hurd to describe a World War II veteran was also used by the New York Times in 1928 to describe the domestic skills of the First Lady Lou Henry Hoover.

The Apple pie was then associated with the female love, with the warmth of home, with the coziness and during the Second World War the soldiers proudly proclaimed that they were fighting for the “mom and apple pie” in a clear allusion to the homeland.

Well, after this short summary about the apple pie and why it is considered a North American icon, we are more than ready to know the recipe and get hands on, right?