Petra Paredez - Pie for Everyone: Recipes and Stories from Petee’s Pie, New York’s Best Pie Shop

Pies at a Fourth of July barbecue in Callicoon, New York: Cheesecake, Strawberry Dream, Juneberry, Chocolate Cream, and Key Lime

Sugarcane was first cultivated in Asia and first refined in India. The practice spread west into Persia, then both refined sugar and the knowledge of how to make it spread even farther, with the Arab expansion in the seventh century. After it reached the Iberian peninsula, Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to Hispaniola, the Portuguese brought it to Brazil, and the Dutch dispersed it throughout the West Indies. Slave labor fueled the sugar industry, and sugar processing became more efficient and less wasteful, making crystallized sugar more widely available and cheaper than ever before. In the early eighteenth century, the American colonies functioned as a trading hub between the West Indies and Europe. By the mid-nineteenth century, sugar cultivation spread into North America, until plantations along the Mississippi River were supplying roughly 25 percent of the worlds sugar (of course, it was available to the fledgling American states as well). With all that sugar at their disposal, its not surprising that American tastes in pie turned sweet.

American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote of pies in the era of the sugar boom:

The making of pies at this period assumed vast proportions that verged upon the sublime. Pies were made by forties and fifties and hundreds, and made of everything on the earth and under the earth.

The pie is an English institution that, when planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant and burst forth into an untold variety of genera and species. Not merely the old traditional mince pie but a thousand strictly American seedlings from that main stock evinced the power of American housewives to adapt old institutions to new uses. Pumpkin pies, cranberry pies, huckleberry pies, cherry pies, green-currant pies, peach, pear, and plum pies, custard pies, apple pies, Marlborough-pudding pies, pies with top crusts and pies without, pies adorned with all sorts of fanciful flutings and architectural strips laid across and around and otherwise varied all attested the boundless fertility of the feminine mind, when once let loose in a given direction.