Take plate, cut rectangular. Cut corners, bend up. Beat and/or solder into place.
Helluva lot easier than making a round pan.
By that logic, take plate, cut circular, bend up edges. Voila circular pan and you skip the beat/solder in place step.
And also note that rectangular ovens aren’t the standard either. I imagine most hand-built ovens are circular rather than rectangular.
Try it sometime.
Heck, try it with a piece of paper. Metal and paper like to fold in straight lines. Trying to make a circle gets messy. And instead of nice straight sides that your pie/cake/bread can slide out of, you get a nasty crimped edge that tenaciously holds it in place.
I don’t really like these explanations because they ought to apply equally to all baked goods, whereas we make plenty of other things in rectangular pans. There’s an explanation I’ve heard, which sounds like a myth to me but is interesting nonetheless, that early American settlers had traditionally baked square pies, but in times of shortage, it became necessary to cook and eat less, and they camouflaged it by making round pies. Of course, this seems impractical if you stop to think it would have meant new pans. Plus, judging by Mangetout’s experiences, it sounds like British pies are also round. But it’s an interesting story.
Pire are not round.
Pie are square.
Ask any mathemetician. 
When I go to IHOP, I demand square pancakes. I haven’t had much success, but I keep trying.
Because pie pans are round.
Have Mrs. Douglas use square tupperware lids instead of round pot lids.
Does anyone get the reference?
Tsk, Tsk, Tsk,–naughty , naughty dopers…Didn’t ya read my OP?
Bosda–You just violated rule number 3.
pravnik-and you violated rule number 1.
It all depends on the size of the piece!! A round pie only gives everybody a bit of crust IF you cut large wedges that reach the center of the pie. (If you cut smaller triangles, you would leave a crustless part in the middle). So the same is true of a square pie: If you cut rectangular strips that reach the middle, then everybody gets a piece of the side crust, with no “gloopy blob” left over
No, my fellow Dopers,say it ain’t so…it seems we have an impasse here! After 23 posts, no definitive answer … Ignorance remains unfought… How can it be? Cecil… help!!!
I do not think it has to imply fully purposeful experiments. I think of it as being akin to evolution. Not everything has to be in accordance with scientific method. Over thousands of years, if there is a benefit to round instead of square, it may have been slowly discovered through accidents or because the village crazy made a circle, and it happened to come out better than the square (or vice-versa, depending on the type of food).
Think of all the different types of cooking, baking, etc. that have been discovered, and are the “right” way to prepare things, even if the reason why is not fully known. They were not discovered through rigorous scientific method, but I assume a very slow process (potentially over generations) of trial and error.
SlyFrog, you’re a person after my own heart.
I think 90% of pre-modern human discoveries were made by dumb luck random unplanned trial and error. People do things the way they do because “they always have”, but every now and then a more useful method pops up and gets adopted. Kinda like organic evolution, with human error and clumsiness as the agent of Punctuated Equilibrium.
I don’t disagree with this as a concept, I just don’t think it ever actually happened; cooking pots have only comparatively recently (that is, after the advent of the pie) started being commonly available any shape other than round; the existence of rectangular ovens may have driven this, along with the technology to reliably make non-circular pots that weren’t prone to a greater risk of breakage.
It’s also probably worth noting that a square dish has two distinct disadvantages over a round one - it’s more difficult to clean (food tends to get burned on in the corners) and it requires slightly more material to make than does a circular dish of the same liquid capacity. I don’t suspect these were significant factors; people just made round pots because they worked.
Let’s see… Applying Cecil’s tried and true methods:
Blame the Egyptians. Er, I can’t think of any good reasons to do this.
Blame the Greeks. No, no good reasons here either. Some Greek mathematicians had a fascination for easily divisible numbers, and squarish cakes are easier to subdivide, but I doubt they had much to do with the baking.
Blame physics. This is probably closer. Pour some goopy dough, or an egg mixture, or some batter on a hot flat rock in your campfire and it gravity will make it roughly round in shape. Add some filling on top, pour more batter over it, and presto: pie.
If you want to make a thicker pie, you need a way to keep the batter or dough from running too thin (or slipping off the edge of your hot rock) so you use whatever is handy to confine the dough to a given area. One could either use a hot rock with a natural depression in it (which in nature is unlikely to be square) or some kind of shell or gourd (also roundish). You could use naturally occuring objects like bones or sticks to build walls (which are mostly straight but can be carved) or skins/intestines (which can fully enclose your food item).
Naturally, an actual oven (which can heat from the top as well as from the bottom and sides) would enable different kinds of cooking, but I’d think that’s relatively late an invention. By the time you can make an oven you can make whatever kind of dishes you want, I should think. My guess is it’s got to do with batter/dough consistency and what can be fried on a flat rock.
Eh, I dunno. I’d rather blame the Greeks.
:smack:
You guys don’t bake, do you?
As a person who bakes many pies, I’m going with: “Pies are round because making square corners using pie crust is a pain in the behind which often results in odd double-crusty bits and weird clumping”
If you whip up some pie crust dough and roll it out to the desired thickness, the crust typically comes out roundish. One can arrange for it to come out in other shapes (like squareish), but it’s a minor pain in the ass. However, dropping a roundish chunk of raw pie crust into a round pan results in fairly smooth and even coverage of said pan without the need for odd cornering maneuvers. Dropping a squarish (and trust me, square-ish is probably as close as you’re getting with only a rolling pin) chunk of raw pie crust into a square pan does not result in smooth even coverage of said pan. It results in the need to trim and re-fuse the edges of the trim back together in order to not have a weird, lumpy, doubled-up spot at the corner.
There’s also the problem of the middle bits of a square (or rectangular) pie. Pie filling (in the case of fruit pies and meat pies) is drippy. Or possibly oozy (in the case of say chocolate cream pie). Unlike cake (which is often rectangular or square), pie filling generally fails to stay in one spot unless contained by something. Hence the point of pie crust in the first place - it provides cohesiveness. It’s basically pie infrastructure. In many pies, if one doesn’t have at least three “walls” what you end up with is top crust immediately on top of bottom crust separated by a very thin layer of filling juice and a landslide of pie goodness on either side taking up the rest of the pan.
Speaking of pie, I need to go make me and my sweetie some pie now. Buh-bye! Apples to peel.
The way I recall it is-
Rocky: Hey Bullwinkle. Didja know that the area of a circle is pi r squared?
Bullwinkle: No, Rocky. Pie are round.
I would suggest reading this excellent resource on the history of pies researched by Lynne Olver.
Probably a combination of all three.
Medieval pie crusts were often described as coffins.
From an English cooking text circa 1381 on how to make Apple Pie [URL=]http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/foc/FoC160small.htmlFor to make Tartys in Applis
“Tak gode Applys and gode spycis and figys and reysons and perys and wan they are wel ybrayed colourd wyth safron wel and do yt in a cofyn and do yt forth to bake wel.”
(I still hold that modern American Pie is round because it is a pot pie and is directly related to the traditional shape of pots. There really is no huge mystery- form following function.)
You might be right. But … The pie dough when flattened just came out roundish and why bother to change it? On the other hand, someone would have to say something like, “I wonder what a square pie would be like?” Then make one, bake it and compare it with the way they had always done it. That would be in the nature of a planned experiment. I seriously doubt that a square pie vs. a round one could happen by dumb luck.
Of course it wouldn’t be a series of scientific experiments in the modern sense, double blind with controls and all that stuff.
From Betty Crocker:
"Pies have become a uniquely American institution. Early settlers brought over recipes for ‘pyes’ baked in long, deep dishes called ‘coffins.’ When times were tight in colonial days, frugal bakers rounded the corners of the coffin and made it shallow, so the pie would stretch further.
Early Americans ate pie for breakfast, pie for lunch, and pie for dinner, using fruit and berries in the summer and nuts, dried fruits and root vegetables in the winter. Pies were kept in pie safes, wooden cabinets with pierced tin doors that let the pies cool but kept the flies off."
The only pie I ever make at home is bacon and egg pie. It is always rectangular because;
a) that is the shape of the oven tin.
b) bacon and egg pie should always be rectangular (unless it is the one person kind).