ISSUE 26, BREAKFAST, Part 2: Pie

The 200 year campaign against Pie for Breakfast

The 200 Year Crusade Against Pie for Breakfast

A word from the Sage of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “If people want piece for breakfast and they live in the pie zone, don’t rob them of their pie, provide they don’t eat too much of several other things.” 

This was not the last word. For Emerson’s associate H. J. Warner remarked, “It was pie at breakfast that broke down Emerson prematurely. No human being, however well, can live long and keep his mind unclouded on pie at breakfast.  Emerson lost his mind—or memory—at a much earlier period than he would have been like to lose it due to the vicious habit of pie at breakfast.”  The British medical journal The Lancet deployed the Emerson case in its attack on the healthfulness of fruit pies at the morning table.  Major papers in Britain and North America joined the chorus against the peculiarly American gustatory perversion. 

The pie zone that referred to was New England where a fruit pie was characteristically served for breakfast.  There from time immemorial pie appeared on the breakfast table—fruit pie—usually apple, sometimes pumpkin in November and December.  In the cities of the North pie appeared in the bakery shop early in the a.m.  Some, particularly the savory ones, were intended for morning purchase and midday consumption.  But morning apple pie . . . sometimes served in a bowl and dowsed with milk and sugar . . . was intended to ignite your constitution for the toils of the day.

Regions differed on the kinds of pies that should appear on the breakfast table.  Southerners condoned savory pies—the shrimp pies, mince meat pies, and pork pies—as dawn fare.  New Englanders championed fruit.  Europeans—particularly French trained hotel chefs—found as early as the 1820s  the American hankering for fruit pies a peculiar form of culinary crudity—all that sugar, fat, flour, and fruit acid! Pies for breakfast multiplied the freakishness. Americans tried to counter such judgments the way they always do by enlisting an M.D. to attest to the healthfulness of morning pies.  Their testimonies began appearing in papers in the 1880s and continued through the 1920s—at about the time the English medical journals began their critiques. 

I do not doubt that sugar and spice can shock the body into drive mode.  Sugar Frosted Flakes were predicated on that assumption.  I suppose you can deconstruct a pie into something roughly equivalent: the grain/crust, the sugar/filling, the fruit (raisin bran, sliced bananas).  I suppose Apple Jacks are the industrial distillation of old N.E. breakfast apple pie. 

Breakfast pie only impinges on my consciousness during the holiday season.  Chilled slices of pumpkin, sweet potato, even (lord save us!) pecan survive Thanksgiving into the week after.  There is something so pleasingly geometrical about a wedge of cold sweet potato pie, particularly when its chilliness is countered with the heat of Assam Tea.  I suspect that for an instance I become an old school New Englander.   

And as for its bad effects on Emerson, his memory didn’t start to go until he was 70.  Mild dementia, not Jonathan Apples.