Apple Pie: How a Simple Dessert Became the Ultimate American Symbol

A flaky golden crust. The sweet gurgle of apple juices bubbling up through steam vents. The warm aroma of cinnamon drifting through the kitchen. For many Americans, apple pie isn't just a dessert — it's a memory. For the author of this piece, apple pie is the ultimate comfort food and the one dish his entire family prepares together — rolling out dough, crimping the crust, peeling and slicing the apples. His mother, the undisputed guardian of the family oven, has jokingly threatened drastic measures to keep her Grandma Fleischer's recipe under wraps. When his then-girlfriend visited home for the first time and they baked a pie together, his mother declared that the young woman would now have to marry him. She did — perhaps, the author jokes, fearing the consequences of not doing so. The irony is that apple pie didn't actually originate in America. Yet the country claimed it anyway, in what might be called a kind of culinary manifest destiny. Colonists brought apple trees to the New World, Johnny Appleseed helped scatter them across the land, and a nation was born with a sweet tooth and a signature dish. The phrase 'mom and apple pie' — a shorthand for all things beloved and quintessentially American — appeared again and again in Associated Press reporting throughout the last century. During both World Wars, soldiers overseas longed for a slice of apple pie from back home. The pie's cultural pull was so strong that when a Texas mother shipped one to the Soviet headquarters in Manhattan for a visiting Nikita Khrushchev, the package triggered a bomb scare that shut down several city blocks in midtown. Then came the turbulent 1960s — a decade marked by overseas conflict, political assassinations, and upheaval on the home front. Into that unsettled atmosphere, McDonald's introduced a small rectangular fried apple pie, offering a mass-produced taste of comfort. The author first learned about that era — and that pie — in a post-WWII American history class. During the first week of class, students were asked to bring in something that symbolized America. Thinking in classic mom-and-apple-pie terms, the author submitted a photo of a bald eagle. His teacher, Mr. Bill Schechter, a self-described devotee of counterculture, was entirely unimpressed. Then two classmates walked in with a McDonald's apple pie box, arguing it represented the rise of corporations and consumerism over home cooking. Mr. Schechter was so struck by the idea that he jumped up and placed the little box on top of his blackboard — both as a teaching reminder and as an informal experiment to see how long the preservative-packed pie would last. Years later, the pie was apparently still holding up. 'It looked as fresh as ever,' Mr. Schechter said in an email. He also pointed out that apple pie was the primary food Jack Kerouac relied on during his famous cross-country journey chronicled in 'On the Road' — and not the fast-food kind. For the author, that mass-produced McDonald's pie marked a turning point — the moment he began to see America in a more complex light, as a place full of tensions and contradictions, where ordinary people strive to hold onto goodness even as larger, sometimes troubling forces loom over daily life. McDonald's has since brought back its fried apple pie to mark America's 250th anniversary. But like Kerouac before him, the author says he'll be sticking with the homemade version. Just don't expect anyone to share the secret recipe. This story is part of 'American Objects,' a recurring series marking the 250th anniversary of the United States.