AMERICANS snarf down 40 million apple pies every year. Thanks to the Dutch who imported them.
In just about every supermarket you’ll find “Dutch apple pie,” with crumbs on top. That’s not the real thing, bellowed Martha Stewart one day. She knows what she’s talking about. Unilever in Rotterdam discovered Martha when she was 15, and vice versa, miss Stewart thus discovered Holland. ‘Appeltaart’ she calls her own recipe, spelled in Dutch. Pie with strips of dough over it.
The streets of Amsterdam smelled of apple pie back in the Golden Age, wrote Russell Shorto in his book on the Dutch role in Manhattan, and there is conclusive evidence for this. Master painter Pieter de Hooch made a brush picture of a woman peeling apples in 1663; Cornelis Bisschop and Reinier Hals did the same a short time later. Apples became a sauce, or they became a pie. Pie painter Willem Claesz showed how they made such pies in 1631 with blackberries and pieces of apple, with a layer of dough on top.
As soon as printing was invented, it all turned into a Big Dutch Baking Show: the “Notabel Boecxken van Cokeryen” (Notable Cook Book) contained an apple pie recipe as early as 1514, and by the time a century later thousands of Dutch men and women emigrated to America, they took it with them. Welcome to America – where no apple trees grew. Those had to be planted by the Dutch first.
“AS American as apple pie,” goes a saying that indicates how American the Dutch recipe has since become. But there’s a side note to that. If you put down two stacks of pie for Americans, small pies and large ones, and you ask them to pick their favorites, you’ll notice that among the small ones cherry and pecan are by far the best-liked, and apple comes in fifth. But among the large pies, apple wins, head and shoulders.
Why? Small pies you eat by yourself, alone, it’s all for you. But the big ones you need to share, and then you have to consider other people’s tastes. Apple is the runner-up choice for just about everyone, and thus the greatest common denominator. Hence the 40 million apple pies over the counter.
The apple pie polder model.
Willem Claesz’s appeltaart, 1631.
