Pie: It's What's for Dinner

Whenever I watch Andrew Zimmern putting away another plate of roasted bugs or fetid goat brains or whatever, I wonder what natives of the culture featured that week would think of good ol' US home cooking. It can be weird, to be sure. I can see rejecting meatloaf. Eschewing tuna casserole? Let me get in line.

But surely, surely pie ought to be beloved the world over. What is not to like about pie? Crust is pretty much universal, isn't it? If not a wheat crust, then some other kind of unleavened pastry turns up in almost every cuisine. And fruit, fruit is good. Everybody eats fruit. And a little sugar (homemade pie should always be slightly under-sugared, if you ask me). That's it. Pie.

But you don't see it in this form in many places. At least one "culture" replaces the fruit with meat (meat!), and calls it pie. It's not really pie, it's a baked sandwich. And the French have a go at with with various baked goods, all a little over the top, outside of the real pie realm.

In the end, we may screw up on an awful lot in this world, but we Americans? We still have pie.

All American Girl that I am, I made six for the fundraiser bake sale tomorrow. The ollalieberry one pictured here was obviously too wet for selling (ahem), so we're down to just five.