New England Apple Pie · Pie Gets Me Out of Bed

New England apple pie is a double-crust pie of sliced tart apples with sugar and spice. American recipes for it go back to Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery of 1796. Vermont made apple pie its state pie in 1999 and asked that it be served with milk, cheddar or ice cream.

The pie is sliced tart apples with sugar and spice, usually nutmeg or cinnamon, baked between a bottom and a top crust. Butter, lemon juice and grated lemon rind are common additions. The top crust is pierced so steam can escape.

Apple pie came to the colonies with English, Dutch and Swedish settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. America’s first cookbook, Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), prints two. One uses stewed and strained apples with lemon peel, cinnamon, mace, rose-water and sugar. In the other, quartered tart apples are baked between crusts, and the top crust is lifted after baking to add sugar, butter and spice.

Fannie Merritt Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) prints the two-crust form. Sour apples are cut in eighths and arranged in a pastry-lined plate. Sugar, nutmeg, salt, lemon juice and grated rind are sprinkled over and dotted with butter, and an upper crust is pressed on. The same book gives a pastry made with lard that yields one two-crust pie.

Vermont’s 1999 Act No. 15 made apple pie the state pie and the apple the state fruit. Its second section asks that “a ‘good faith’ effort shall be made” when serving apple pie in Vermont to serve it with a glass of cold milk, a slice of cheddar weighing at least half an ounce, or a large scoop of vanilla ice cream. The codified statute, 1 V.S.A. § 512, reads only “The State Pie shall be apple pie.” The sponsor, Ed Paquin, told Vermont Public that an elementary class generated the idea and that other lawmakers added the dairy provisions. The state’s Agency of Agriculture describes the law as a mandate “if possible.”

Cheese with apple pie is an English custom dating to the seventeenth century, according to Wikipedia, and it persists in dairy regions such as New England. Wisconsin has no such law; its State Law Library notes that a 1935 statute briefly required restaurants to serve a little cheese and butter with meals. Vermont is the only state assigned to this style, on the strength of its 1999 act.

A young woman bends to slide a pie into the oven of a wood-burning range in a ranch kitchen. — Mary Mutz baking an apple pie on the ranch, Moreno Valley, Colfax County, New Mexico, February 1943. John Collier Jr., Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Public domain (Library of Congress, FSA/OWI collection, no known restrictions)

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