Pie crust cookies this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article is about the baked good. For the mathematical constant, see Pi. A pie is a baked dish which is usually made of a pastry dough casing that contains a filling of various sweet or savoury ingredients.

Pies are defined by their crusts. A top-crust pie has the filling in the bottom of the dish and is covered with a pastry or other covering before baking. A two-crust pie has the filling completely enclosed in the pastry shell. Pies can be a variety of sizes, ranging from bite-size to those designed for multiple servings. Cooked birds were frequently placed by European royal cooks on top of a large pie to identify its contents. The first known use of the word ‘pie’ appears in 1303 in the expense accounts of the Bolton Priory in Yorkshire.

But the Oxford English Dictionary is uncertain to its origin and says ‘no further related word is known outside English’. Early pies were in the form of flat, round or freeform crusty cakes called galettes consisting of a crust of ground oats, wheat, rye, or barley containing honey inside. Ancient Greeks are believed to have originated pie pastry. A 19th century depiction of a Roman feast, where pastry-covered meat dishes were served. The Romans made a plain pastry of flour, oil, and water to cover meats and fowls which were baked, thus keeping in the juices. The Roman approach of covering “birds or hams with dough” has been called more of an attempt to prevent the meat from drying out during baking than an actual pie in the modern sense. The 1st-century Roman cookbook Apicius makes various mentions of recipes which involve a pie case.

Pies remained as a staple of traveling and working peoples in the colder northern European countries, with regional variations based on both the locally grown and available meats, as well as the locally farmed cereal crop. In these colder countries, butter and lard were the main fats in use, which meant that pie cooks created dough that could be rolled flat and moulded into different shapes. In the Medieval era, pies were usually savory meat pies made with “beef, lamb, wild duck, magpie pigeon — spiced with pepper, currants or dates”. Medieval cooks had restricted access to ovens due to their costs of construction and need for abundant supplies of fuel.

Since pies could be easily cooked over an open fire, this made pies easier for most cooks to make. The eating of mince pies during festive periods is a tradition that dates back to the 13th century, as the returning Crusaders brought pie recipes containing “meats, fruits and spices”. Pies in the 1400s included birds, as song birds at the time were a delicacy and protected by Royal Law. Medieval England had an early form of sweet pies, but they were called tarts and fruit pies were unsweetened, because sugar was a rare and costly “symbol of wealth”. In the Middle Ages, a pie could have a number of items as its filling, but a pastry would have only a single filling.

A detail from Pieter Claesz’ 1627 painting of turkey pie. Until the start of the 15th century, pies were expected to contain meat or fish. Red Deer Venison, Wild-Boar, Gammons of Bacon, Swans, Elkes, Porpus and such like standing dishes, which must be kept long” in a “moyst, thick, tough, course and long-lasting crust, and therefore of all other your Rye paste is best for that purpose. 1660, with the Restoration of the monarchy. In the Georgian era sweetened pies of meat and dried fruits began to become less popular. In recipe books of the period sweet veal, sweet lamb or sweet chicken pies are given alongside recipes for unsweetened alternatives with the same ingredients made for those who could “no longer stomach the sweetened flesh meats enjoyed by earlier generations”.

Pumpkin pies were eaten by ‘people of substance’ in England from the 1650s onwards but fell out of favour during the eighteenth century. Pumpkin was sliced, fried with sweet herbs sweetened with sugar and eggs were added. This was put into a pastry case with currants and apples. Pumpkin pie was introduced to America by early colonists where it became a national dish. During the nineteenth-century pies became, according to food historian Janet Clarkson, ‘universally esteemed’ in a way that other foods were not.