deep, sugared tart cherries baked beneath a golden woven lattice until the filling runs thick and ruby, the great pie of the American summer, of the Fourth of July, and of the orchards of Michigan and the West
Origin: United States
From the journey of Cherry.
The cherry pie is one of the icons of American baking, as bound up with the national imagination as apple pie, and a direct descendant of the Kentish cherry pies the colonists brought across the Atlantic. It found its true ingredients in the nineteenth-century American orchards: the sweet Bing cherry, raised in Oregon in 1875, became the dessert cherry of the West, while around the Great Lakes, in the fruit belt of Michigan along the shore of Lake Michigan, the tart Montmorency cherry found a near-perfect home and came to supply the nation's pies. It is the tart cherry that makes the best pie, its sharpness standing up to the sugar and the baking where a sweet cherry turns flat. The fruit is sugared, thickened, and baked in a flaky crust beneath a woven lattice that lets the dark juices bubble through, and the finished pie, deep red and glistening, is a fixture of the American summer, of county fairs and the Fourth of July, and of the tale every American child is told of young George Washington and the cherry tree he could not lie about. Michigan, the heart of the tart-cherry country, celebrates it each July at the National Cherry Festival in Traverse City.
Tart (sour) cherries make the definitive American pie; if using sweet cherries, cut the sugar and add extra lemon juice. Frozen tart cherries are excellent and available year-round; drain them and use the full amount of cornflour. Quick-cooking tapioca is the traditional Midwestern thickener and gives a clearer set than cornflour.
Mapping Culinary History
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