Great American Pie Month

Stu Spivack (Flickr account) / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

February is Great American Pie Month in the United States.

Pies are baked dishes that contain either sweet or savoury ingredients. Sweet pies are filled with fruit, nuts or sweetened vegetables (rhubarb is a vegetable that is commonly treated like fruit). Savoury pies are filled with fish, meat, vegetables, both or things such as egg and cheese.

There are different types of pies, depending on whether they have a top crust, a bottom crust or both. Pies, in concept, date back thousands of years as, for one thing, they are a comparatively easily transported food. Pastry, as used in pies, is a more recent innovation, but is still believed to date back over two thousand years.

With this holiday celebrating the American pie, two of the most common American pies are apple and cherry - even though neither originated in the United States. For the Southern states, cream pies of different types are another strongly associated dish, as are pecan pies. Pumpkin pie is another, associated with Christmas. These pies are all sweet pies, rather than savoury ones, and it is perhaps for the sweet types of pie that America is most strongly known.