As American as apple pie turns out to be a misleading phrase. This episode traces the dessert back to a 1390 English recipe in The Forme of Cury, which used apples, figs, raisins, pears, saffron and honey baked inside a hard, inedible crust called a coffyn. A 1514 Dutch cookbook then added expensive spices from the spice trade. Early colonists in North America had only sour native crab apples, and because apple seeds do not grow true to type, they had to graft European trees.

While they waited, colonists made cider and dried apple pies, and the Royal Navy later made mock apple pie from crackers, a recipe Ritz promoted in the 1930s. We follow the pie’s rise as an American symbol from Amelia Simmons’s 1796 cookbook to the wartime phrase mom and apple pie and Cold War messaging. We finish with the food science of lemon juice and browning enzymes, the Bramley dome, cheddar on top, and versions from France, Greece and Sweden.

• Why the medieval coffyn crust worked as a baking pan, not something to eat
• How extreme heterozygosity made grafting essential for colonial orchards
• Mock apple pie from the Royal Navy to the Great Depression
• How the pie became a symbol of American identity in World War II and the Cold War
• Tarte Tatin, Greek milopita, and Swedish oat-crumble apple pies