American Pie

Apple Pie without the ice cream.

#5 -- I've seen 19th century British travellers in the US comment on the ubiquity of pie here.

"As American as apple pie" dates from the 1960s. From the Phrase Finder
>[Apple pie,] a dish whose patriotic symbolism is expressed in a 1984 book by Susan Purdy, 'As Easy as Pie': 'This is IT - what our country and flag are as American as. Since the earliest colonial days, apple pies have been enjoyed in America for breakfast, for an entrée, and for dinner. Colonist wrote home about them and foreign visitors noted apple pie as one of our first culinary specialties.' We cannot claim to have invented the apple pie, just to have perfected it." But here's the surprising part. The expression "as American as apple pie," the authors say, is not that old. "Apple pie figures in our figurative language, too, as in the expressions 'simple as pie' (since everyone supposedly knows how to make apple pie) and, though not an Americanism, 'apple-pie order' (1780). But it was only in the twentieth century, apparently in the 1960s, that we began to be 'as American as apple pie.'"

"Mom and apple pie" or "motherhood and apple pie" is
> an often parodied sentiment expressed about allegedly quintessential elements of American home life.

in 1975, Chevrolet ran a very successful series of ads touting "Baseball. hot dogs, Apple pie and Chevrolet" Watch it here

Supposedly

When I first visited Ireland in the 1980s I was surprised by the ubiquity of apple pie in the cafes and teashops there.

But the distinctive thing about American apple pie, from a British/Irish perspective, is that you put some corn starch in it.

you put some corn starch in it.

Or some other thickener. I prefer rice flour. I know people who use tapioca.

From Catch-22+ (1961): +"The hot dog, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Mom's apple pie. That's what everyone's fighting for."

And from Time+ (3/26/1928): +"As American as baseball or apple pie . . . ." (quoting Herbert Hoover's biographer)

And from an ad in Life+ (12/25/1939) +"As American as apple pie!"

http://books.google.com/books?id=4UEEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_v2_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false (scroll down three pages)

Thanks, 889. It didn't sound like a 1960s coinage to me.

Changing the subject, at #15's link to the 1939 Life, in the letters on the page after the "As American as apple pie!" movie ad, there's a letter by Thomas Mann's daughter Erika headed "Jewish taunt" about a mistranslation by Life of something written on a German mine. I can't make out the word that she describes as a Jewish (=Yiddish) word for bankruptcy, not a German word for distress.

Can anyone make it out clearly? Pfette? Plette? Does anyone know the word? Is she right?

Hit the "zoom in" control and the word becomes very clear, at least on my screen. It's "Pleite."

It says "Pleite." (Tip of the day: Google Books has a "zoom" button in the top left.)

Here is a bit about the word. (It's also used in Dutch, but in a different meaning: something or someone that is pleite is gone/has disappeared.)

Very cool. Thanks both for drawing my attention to the zoom icon and shilgia for the etymology.

I wonder what took her to Omaha. (But don't bother trying to find out. Thanks again.)