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.

National Lemon Meringue Pie Day

In America, August 15th is National Lemon Meringue Pie Day.

This is, as the name suggests, a type of pie. This variety of pie is made without a top crust, so only has a bottom crust which is usually of shortcrust pastry. Shortcrust pastry does not puff up during baking, as it does not contain a leavening agent.

Lemon meringue pie is a baked sweet dessert pie, not a savoury one. The pie crust is filled with lemon custard, and then topped with meringue topping. The earliest known recipe for this pie dates back to the 19th century, although lemon flavoured pies and other dishes have been around for centuries.

The custard is flavoured with lemon zest, which is gratings from the rind of a lemon - don't use a waxed lemon, or be sure to remove the wax first, otherwise what you will have won't be lemon zest, but wax, and lemon juice, and is usually made from egg yolks, sugar and starch. The meringue topping uses egg whites, which is useful, as this means both parts of the egg can be used after separating them, and sugar, and is beaten well before being added on top of the custard. The dish is then baked.

National Raspberry Cream Pie Day

In the United States August 1st is National Raspberry Cream Pie Day.

Cream pies are a type of sweet dessert dish. The pie is a filled pie, otherwise known as a bottom or single crust pie, in which the dish is lined with pastry, but the top is left open. Flaky pastry, which is similar to puff pastry but has large lumps of shortening in it, is the most common type of pie crust used, but there are other types.

In the cream pie, the pie crust is filled with a custard or pudding filling, which is then topped with whipped cream. The custard or pudding filling can come in a variety of flavours; in a raspberry cream pie this is, of course, raspberry flavoured. The most common type of raspberry used is the more widely known Eurasian red raspberry, but others could be used, such as the purple and black varieties. The raspberries are more likely to be puréed before being mixed into the filling, rather than being used whole.

National Pecan Pie Day

National Pecan Pie Day is on July 12th in the United States.

This is a type of sweet dessert pie whose primary ingredients - for the filling, at least - are corn syrup and pecans. Other types of sugar syrup may also be used, and it is traditionally served with either whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

The earliest definite references to pecan pie date back to the late 19th century, making this quite a modern type of pie, and it is strongly associated with the United States, especially the Southern U.S. It is also a dish which is strongly associated with both Christmas and Thanksgiving in America.

The association with the U.S. is not surprising, as the pecan nut comes from the pecan tree, which is a type of hickory native to the Americas. Pecans also would appear to be a genuine, botanical, nut, not just a culinary one.

National Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie Day

June 9th is National Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie Day in the United States.

This is another one of the more specific national days, celebrating not just a pie, but a pie that has two specific ingredients - strawberries and rhubarb.

Rhubarb, although it is usually treated as a fruit, is actually a type of vegetable. It grows from rhizomes and has long, thick stalks topped with large leaves. The stalks are the part which is eaten - other parts of the plant are poisonous. Rhubarb stalks are quite firm and need softening in order to be made into a pie, so they would usually be pre-cooked before used to fill the pie shell. Rhubarb is also quite tart to the taste, so this is usually countered with something sweet; in this case, strawberries.

National Apple Pie Day

May 13th is National Apple Pie Day in the United States.

This popular sweet pie dessert is commonly associated with America, resulting in the phrase "As American as apple pie", although the apple pie does not actually originate in the US and pre-dates the country by many centuries. In England, the apple pie dates back to the fourteenth century at least, and there are Dutch recipes dating back to the sixteenth. There is also a Swedish variant, and colonists from all three countries brought the pie to the Americas.

Apple pies are usually double crust pies; that is, they have both a top and bottom crust, although the top crust may be a lattice. The apples used in the pies are generally cooking apples such as the Bramley, although the Granny Smith is both used in cooking and eaten raw. Other ingredients would be sugar and spices. The pie may be served hot or cold, and is often eaten with a scoop of ice cream.

National Coconut Cream Pie Day

National Coconut Cream Pie Day is on May 8th in the United States.

This dessert is yet another flavour in the wide range of different cream pies that there are. As with all cream pies, this is made from a pie base, which may be a standard pie crust or instead made from cookies or Graham crackers that have been crumbled. The filling is put inside the pie crust, and is a rich custard or pudding made from eggs, flour, milk and cream, and is similar to crème patissière. Cream pies lack a crust top, but always have a whipped cream top.

The filling in this one is flavoured with coconut, and the top may be decorated with more coconut. Like many things with the word "nut" in the name, coconuts are not botanical nuts. They are in fact drupes. The white, fleshy "meat" of the coconut is the part that is most commonly used in cooking.

National Blueberry Pie Day

National Blueberry Pie Day is on April 28th in the United States.

Another day celebrating another sweet dessert pie, this time one made with blueberries.

Many types of dessert pies are filled with fruit, but blueberries are considered to be one of the easiest that can be made. Like other pies, this has a pastry base inside which is the blueberry filling. the pie may lack a top crust or, alternatively, it can be a circular pastry crust or a crumble crust.

Blueberries are small, indigo coloured berries that are grown in many places. The peak season for harvesting can stretch from May to August, in the Northern Hemisphere, so April is on the early side of the season to be celebrating a pie made from blueberries.

The reason that blueberry pies are considered to be one of the easiest is because of the amount of preparation that needs doing to them first - which is basically washing them and removing any extraneous stalks. They don't need seeding, pitting, skinning or pre-cooking; they can just be baked as is.

National Banana Creme Pie Day

National Banana Creme Pie Day is on March 2nd in the United States.

This is yet another custard filled dessert pie (some cream pies are cakes). The pie is made from a pie shell, which is then filled with the custard - the custard is related to crème patissière, a pastry cream which has starch added to thicken it.

The creme, or cream, pie can have many different flavourings, with fruit being the most popular. In this case, the chosen fruit is banana. The bananas can be blended into the cream (very ripe bananas are best for this) or, alternatively, simply sliced up and placed in the cream. The pie is topped with whipped cream after cooking.

Like many such dishes, it has a strong association with the United States, in particular the American South.

National Cherry Pie Day

February 20th is National Cherry Pie Day in the United States.

It might not be quite as American as apple pie (as the saying goes, even thought the dish pre-dates the US), but cherry pie is still a favourite dish and also a traditional American dessert.

This is a pie made with a cherry filling. There are two main types of cherries, tart and sweet, and tart cherries are traditionally used in cherry pie, which give a tarter taste to the finished pie, and how sweet it is is easier to control.

This is a traditional dish in North America, both the US and Canada, as well as Germany and Austria. This is a rather odd time of year to celebrate it, though; it's traditionally eaten at the height of the cherry season, which is July, not February. It can of course be refrigerated now, but it would have been expected that the day would fall in summer, not in winter.

Cherry pie is usually served with cream, whipped or pouring, or ice cream.

National Pumpkin Pie Day

December 25th is National Pumpkin Pie Day in the United States.

This may seem an odd dish to have Christmas Day as its national day, given all the other foods associated with this day, such as turkey, Christmas pudding and fruitcake, but pumpkins are used in many different recipes in the US and are native to North America, and are popular during the Thanksgiving and Christmas season.

Although the harvesting season for pumpkins - a type of squash - was earlier in the year, pumpkin pie is rarely made from the raw pumpkin itself, as this is certainly a harder way of doing it. The pie is made using a pie shell and rarely has a top crust. The interior filling is a pumpkin based custard that has been flavoured with spices, with cinnamon, cloves, ginger and nutmeg being the most common. When making pumpkin pie, many will normally use pre-made commercially available pumpkin pie filling, which comes with the spices included in it. Using a pre-made pie shell and pre-made filling certainly makes this an easy dish to prepare.

National Pie Day

December 1st is National Pie Day in the United States.

The pie is a very old dish, with some of the oldest dating back over 11,000 years, although pie pastry is rather more recent. Pies are also very versatile, coming in a whole range of types, and they can be both sweet and savoury. The pie served the original purpose of a foodstuff that was easy to transport - the casing surrounding the interior protected it and made it easier to transport. The pie as we know it today is a rather more recent invention. Some earlier pies used earthen pie cases, rather than pastry ones, which could then be reused. The pie would be used to keep food fresh for periods of time, or clean in unsanitary conditions. In the latter case, if the pie was made of pastry, the pie crust itself would be disposed of and only the actual filling would be eaten.

There are today different types of pies. The top crust pie, known as the cobbler, has the filling at the bottom of the dish, which is then covered by the crust. A filled pie is the reverse; the pastry is at the bottom of the dish and the filling is put into it. Two crust pies have pastry on both the top and the bottom of the pie, enclosing the filling, although it isn't unknown for the top crust to be a lattice of pastry rather than a complete crust. There are many different varieties of pie, used as desserts, snacks and savoury meals, with many different regional variations.

National Lemon Cream Pie Day

National Lemon Cream Pie Day is in November 29th in the United States.

Cream pies are pies or cakes that are filled with pudding or custard, of different flavours. The crust can be of different types, including pastry. The lemon cream pie is a speciality of the Southern United States.

The traditional dish tends to be made on a standard pie shell; this could be a fresh one, or a pre-bought one. The lemon flavoured filling is made from cream, eggs and sugar - and, of course, lemons. This would then be baked in the oven.

This is traditionally an open topped pie without a top crust, but, as an alternative, it can be topped with meringue instead of being open. The meringue would be added after the pie has been baked.

National Bavarian Cream Pie Day

November 27th is National Bavarian Cream Pie Day in the United States.

The Bavarian cream pie, which is sometimes just named Bavarian cream, is not really a pie and it probably isn't from Bavaria either. It is similar to cream, but actually has more in common with custard.

This is a sweet dessert that is believed to have been created in the early 19th century by Parisian chef Marie-Antoine Carême, an exponent of grande cuisine and believed to be one of the first ever international celebrity chefs. The latter being a quite impressive feat, predating television chefs by more than a little. It is named either after the German region of Bavaria, or to honour a visiting Bavarian notable.

Bavarian cream is a pastry cream that has been thickened with either isinglass or gelatin and then flavoured with liqueur. Whipped cream is added, and then the mix is used to fill a fluted mould, chilled, and then turned out when ready to eat. It is often served with fruit or fruit sauces.