The Word

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like ‘restaurant’, ‘ambulance’, ‘dentist’ and  around 40% of our present English words, ‘dessert’ originates from French. Its root, ’Desservir’, means ‘to clear the table’. The word ‘dessert’—which first started to be used in England in the 14th century— gave a kind of continental sophistication to the greasy task of carting off all the dishes, food scraps and heaps of gnawed bones from the table. The sweet course could then be placed on a cleared, but not necessarily clean, surface for guests to savour.

The Pie

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roman Pies
Although the first apple pie recipe was published in 1381, pies had already been around for a long time. The Romans made them, and like many important things Roman, they borrowed the plans for them from the Greeks. The Romans were partial to all manner of meat pies, as well as rye-crusted honey and goat cheese ones, the popcorn of the people and snack of choice by spectators in the Empire’s arenas. If you ever go to Nimes France, by the way, you can look up at the ceiling on the first level concourse of the very-well preserved Roman amphitheatre (completed @ 70 CE) and see the stones that were blackened by centuries of barbecued meats & oven-roasted pies. The Romans marked their expanding empire with pie, primarily high-protein ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sweet Pies
Dried fruit and honey were probably the ancient world’s first sweeteners, but the real onslaught of sweets began with the cultivation & popularization of sugar cane. The people of India had begun to grow, refine and crystallize sugarcane for trade @ 500 BCE. Many hundreds of years later, beginning in the 12th century, the Crusades and colonization started to spread the use of sugarcane. Sugar began to be manufactured in Europe in the Middle Ages, but sweets were very expensive, so the rich had a monopoly on dental caries and diabetes. Not really. Sugar was so expensive that sugarized sweets were consumed on very special, relatively rare occasions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rhubarb and Its Pie
What a weird vegetable. Its leaves are poisonous, packing a shuddering whack of oxalic acid. The stalks are stringy and talk about sour! You don’t casually pick a stock of rhubarb and start munching on on it, unless you like to give your face muscles a real workout. So sugar is a godsend for the stuff: sugar & the Victorian English, who managed to create a new version, easy to grow, relatively sweet and reasonably tender. When you stewed this variety of rhubarb, smothering it with sugar, it turned out to be… well… ambrosia for the English.   
They became obsessed and used that $%^& for everything: stews, jams, jellies, puddings… and pies. After about 100 years of overuse, rhubarb concoctions fell out out favour, becoming a sort of stodgy curiosity. But now, apparently rhubarb's popularity is on the rise again!
 

And you’ll understand why
when your try our pie