One of the last lines in the story The Devil and Daniel Webster is, “I hope there’s pie for breakfast, Neighbor Stone.” Does anyone know what kind of pie he was talking about? Did they eat pie (as we know it) for breakfast, or did “pie” back then refer to something else?
Mmmmmmm… Pie…
We now know the orgin of “When come back bring pie”.
It only took one post for a Weebl and Bob comment. Sorry, Knighted Vorpal Sword, can’t help you. Just had to make a comment in response to Maud’Dib. I thought of the same thing when I read the subject.
Hats For Clowns.
Well, I know of at least one family for which the traditional Friday-after-Thanksgiving breakfast is a slice of leftover pie and a cup of coffee.
Perhaps that’s a distant echo of a practice that was more common in Daniel Webster’s day?
Errr, it’s set in about 1840, right? And the author died in about 1940? Those are both pie-for-breakfast generations.
Sometimes pie is just pie. 
I’d like to live in a world where pie is always pie. 
Maybe they were talking about quiche?
Most historical recipes I’ve seen for quiche-like things always seem to be dinner/tea/lunch food. No reason they wouldn’t have been eaten for breakfast, though.
I think apple pie is still the canonical breakfast pie.
It was peach pie.
Ma Stone brings the covered dish out to the open-air table where the Grange men are having breakfast with Jabez, and presents it to Webster, who cocks and eyebrow and asks “Peach?” She nods and opens the lid and the pie is gone, and she says “Well, I’ll be…” and we cut to Mr Scratch, sitting on a fence and tucking in. Then Ma goes back in and brings out a second, larger pie.
That’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
(In the story, the type of pie isn’t specified.)
Ukulele Ike–
I couldn’t agree more. What a marvelous movie! Why isn’t it better known? How come so few people have seen this gem?
Walter Huston (what a talent!) shamelessly steals every frame that he appears in without half trying. And the beautiful, eerie Simone Simon is just too weird for words.
What the heck is wrong with some pie for breakfast?
Nobody bats an eyelash if you eat a couple of Krispy Kreme doughnuts with your morning coffee… why wouldn’t a nice slice of apple or peach pie be just as acceptable? :>
I know from experience that a generous slice of strawberry rhubarb pie, black coffee and bacon is a fine fine meal.
Snug: And don’t forget the absolutely brilliant Bernard Herrmann score! 'Member Huston playing the fiddle for the dance at the big house-raising/birth of son party? He played like the very Devil himself…
Of course they at pie for breakfast! They weren’t savages, or barbarian heathens. Whenever there is pie in the house at breakfast time, breakfast is pie. How could it be any other way? Sure God Himself would smite anyone so blasphemous as to eat a bowl of cereal while there’s PIE sitting in the fridge!
(calms down)
Sorry 'bout that. In my family, we get pretty emotional about food and food traditions.
I have a book titled American Food:The Gastronomic Story , by Evan Jones. Only the scond half is recipes, the first is a detailed history of how and what Americans have eaten, from colonial days to the present. I searched the index and came up with the following: “Southerners of the nineteenth century may not have indulged as often as did New Englanders in a slice of pie for breakfast, but they made up for such a lack in sweet breads of all kinds.” That quote had a footnote at the bottom of the page. "A nineteenth -century writer decided that in northern New England ‘all the hill and country towns were full of women who would be mortified if visitors caught them without pie in the house.’ As he saw things, the absence of pie at breakfast ‘was more noticeable than the scarcity of the Bible.’ "
What? No one else here eats pie for breakfast?
What’s the difference between pie and donuts, or danish?
Pie has been around for centuries, but most of the early pies were food type pies - meat pies, fish pies, etc.
By the time this story was written, dessert pies had become common, but food pies were still common as well. So he could have been hoping to eat:
Eel Pie or Veal Olive Pie: http://www.bahnhof.se/~chimbis/tocb/appendix/torchrono.html#1800
Vinegar Pie: http://www.northpolewest.com/index.cgi?page=recipes.htm
“Minced Pie of Beef” http://www.pilgrimhall.org/ThanksPieMince1.htm
Sweet Potato Pie: http://www.foodbooks.com/recipes.htm#SweetPotato Pie.
Or it could have been apple, pumpkin, or cranberry pie, which were also popular at the time.
[homer simpson]Mmmmmm…Eel Pie…[/homer simpson]
Apparently however, there is no pie in space. I recently read about NASA space foods (I can’t remember where) and I specifically remember that they did not have pie. Candy bars are allowed in space, pudding has gone to the moon, there’s even space lemonade, but no pie. How do they expect people to stay on the space station for months on end without pie? I’m amazed that there hasn’t been an incident over this already–an astronaut driven mad by his (or her) desire for pie.
Maybe this whole space program thing really is just a sham . . . .