The apple pie (alongside mom, of course) became the symbolic food of a nation

Audio By Carbonatix

Flaky, golden crust. Apple juices bubbling through its vents. The scent of cinnamon.

Apple pie is my comfort food, and the only thing my family always cooks together: rolling the dough, fluting the crust’s edges, peeling and chopping the apples.

My mom, the keeper of our oven’s flame, has hinted she would commit heinous acts to keep her Grandma Fleischer’s recipe secret. When my then-girlfriend came home for the first time and we baked a pie, my mom informed her that now she’d have to marry me. (She did, perhaps fearing just desserts.)

Never mind that the delicacy didn’t originate in America; we claimed it as gastronomic manifest destiny. Colonists brought over apples, Johnny Appleseed spread them far afield and we became an apple pie nation. “Mom and apple pie” — shorthand for beloved, quintessential Americana — appears repeatedly in Associated Press stories from the last century.

Soldiers in both world wars pined for apple pie. A Texas mom shipped one to the Soviet headquarters in Manhattan for a visiting Nikita Khrushchev, prompting a bomb scare that shut down several midtown blocks.

The 1960's featured wars abroad and assassinations and social upheaval at home. Into that turbulence, McDonald’s introduced a palliative in the rectangular form of a fried apple pie. I learned about that period — and that pie — in my post-WWII American history class.

The first week, we had to submit something symbolizing America. With my mom-and-apple-pie worldview, I turned in a photo of a bald eagle. Mr. Bill Schechter, a counterculture devotee, was thoroughly unimpressed. Then two girls presented a McDonald’s apple pie, representing corporations and consumerism having replaced mom’s cooking.

Mr. Schechter sprang from his chair and placed the little box atop his blackboard, both as a reminder of the lesson and to test the pie’s preservative-laden staying power.

Years later, the pie “looked as fresh as ever,” Mr. Schechter said by email. He reminded me that apple pies were Jack Kerouac's chief sustenance on his eye-opening, cross-country voyage in “On the Road” — and not the McDonald’s variety.

That mass-produced pie embodies a moment I started viewing America differently — as a place with strains and conflicts, where most ordinary people are decent and safeguard sweetness but dwell in the shadows of great and sometimes sinister forces.

McDonald’s reintroduced its fried apple pie for America’s 250th. Like Kerouac, I’ll stick with what's homemade. Just don't ask for the secret recipe.

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Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.