The English proclivity for pies made it safely across the Atlantic, and took deep root in New England. Mark Twain’s friend Charles Dudley Warner, writing in 1872, found that “all the hill and country towns of New England are full of those excellent women, the very salt of the housekeeping earth, who would feel ready to sink in mortification through their scoured kitchen floors, if visitors should catch them without a pie in the house. The absence of pie would be more noticed than a scarcity of Bible even.”

In 1902, the New York Times blasted a suggestion that pie should be eaten no more than twice a week. This, said the Times, was “utterly insufficient … as anyone who knows the secret of our strength as a nation and the foundation of our industrial supremacy must admit. Pie is the American synonym of prosperity, and its varying contents the calendar of the changing seasons. Pie is the food of the heroic. No pie-eating people can ever be permanently vanquished.”