Jump to navigation Apple cobbler with pie crust to search This article is about the baked good. For the mathematical constant, see Pi.
A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients. Pies are defined by their crusts. A top-crust pie has the filling in the bottom of the dish and is covered with a pastry or other covering before baking. A two-crust pie has the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell.
Pies can be a variety of sizes, ranging from bite-size to ones designed for multiple servings. Cooked birds were frequently placed by European royal cooks on top of a large pie to identify its contents. Medieval pies also contained many different animal meats, including chickens, crows, pigeons and rabbits. Early pies were in the form of flat, round or freeform crusty cakes called galettes consisting of a crust of ground oats, wheat, rye, or barley containing honey inside. Ancient Greeks are believed to have originated pie pastry. A 19th century depiction of a Roman feast, where pastry-covered meat dishes were served. The Romans made a plain pastry of flour, oil, and water to cover meats and fowls which were baked, thus keeping in the juices.
The Roman approach of covering “birds or hams with dough” has been called more of an attempt to prevent the meat from drying out during baking than an actual pie in the modern sense. The 1st-century Roman cookbook Apicius makes various mentions of recipes which involve a pie case. Pies remained as a staple of traveling and working peoples in the colder northern European countries, with regional variations based on both the locally grown and available meats, as well as the locally farmed cereal crop. In these colder countries, butter and lard were the main fats in use, which meant that pie cooks created dough that could be rolled flat and moulded into different shapes.
In the Medieval era, pies were usually savory meat pies made with “beef, lamb, wild duck, magpie pigeon — spiced with pepper, currants or dates”. Medieval cooks had restricted access to ovens due to their costs of construction and need for abundant supplies of fuel. Since pies could be easily cooked over an open fire, this made pies easier for most cooks to make. The eating of mince pies during festive periods is a tradition that dates back to the 13th century, as the returning Crusaders brought pie recipes containing “meats, fruits and spices”. Pies in the 1400s included birds, as song birds at the time were a delicacy and protected by Royal Law.