Global History Quotes

“A pie is only as good as its pastry, and one of the delights of a good pie is the contrast in texture between the crisp pastry and the filling - whatever it might be. In a perfect pie, each component is independently perfect - the mouthfeel of the pastry (buttery, flaky, crumbly) and the mouthfeel of the filling (rich, unctuous, tender, sticky, crunchy, etc.); and the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Pastry-making, as every amateur baker fears, is as much about technique as ingredients. The rationale behind the well-known advice to keep the hands, implements and kitchen cool while making pastry, to use minimal water and to handle it lightly is obvious, now that we understand the process. Cool handling lengthens the time that the fat in the dough stays solid; using minimum amount of water reduces the gluten content and also allows the dough to be crisper; minimal handling also reduces the gluten, so we do not knead pastry dough as we do bread.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“There was no doubt in the minds of nineteenth-century cooks and cookbook writers that there was something about pie - a difficult to grasp something that made it universally esteemed in a way that cake or stew or soup was not.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“An outstanding historical feature of the pie is that it is a self-contained meal which can be eaten in the hand, without the need of cutlery, crockery or napery.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“We are social animals, and we don't usually find and eat food alone, so we associate it at an emotional level with people, events and circumstances. Eventually a food becomes embedded with meaning, allowing anthropologists to asks questions like: 'Do pies mean anything?”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“It is the food that looks backwards through our shared family memories. It is comfort food, the food inextricably linked in our cultural consciousness with motherhood and nationhood. Even though the pies are no longer a daily item on our dinner tables, they still figure large in many of our memories: pies mean Thanksgiving and Christmas and picnics and silly old Aunt Mabel and going to the football with Dad.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“A cook who has gone to extra trouble, who loves you enough not to just toss the stew onto a plate with a lump of bread, but to craft for it its own little pastry gift-box. Is this the crux of it?”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“A pie, like a building, requires construction after all.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“There were a number of reasons for decreeing abstention from meat. In ancient times meat was thought to inflame the passions (thereby distracting the mind from higher thoughts) whereas fish (or rather, creatures that lived in the water, which included whales and 'porpuses') were seen as cooling. It was also believed that the characteristics or habits of everything in the natural world would be transmitted to the eater, so the fact that fish did not have an obvious sex life added to its suitability for days of religious observance.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“HUMAN is the Only Threat to the Universe - & sorry to say, but even Creator Exist, S/he is crying for the mistake of making this creature - Tanveer [Hossain Mullick] unfortunately one the species.”
― Tanveer Hossain Mullick

“The thick crust of the early pie acted like a baking dish. For hundreds of years, it was the only form of baking container - meaning everything was pie. The crust also, as it turned out, performed two other useful functions: it acted as a carrying and storage container (before lunch boxes) and, by virtue of excluding air, as a method of preservation (before canning and refrigeration).”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“After a few millennia of inspiration, the primitive clay oven gave rise to the gleaming modern steel version. A high-tech oven alone does not, however, turn a bake-mete into a pie as we know it. One more important development was necessary. Pastry had to be invented.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Dough becomes pastry when fat is added.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The key is gluten. Gluten is a protein with long, elastic molecules which simultaneously enable the dough to be made stronger (by providing structure) and lighter (by enabling the trapping of air bubbles). A lot of gluten means a firm structure, which is ideal for bread, but bad for pastry. Too little gluten means no structure and no air-trapping, so flat bread and tough pastry. The task of the pastry-cook is to get just the right amount of gluten to make the pastry light and crumbly and flaky.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Wheat is the only grain with a significant amount of gluten, so we have our first clue to the origins of pastry. Superb pastry could only have developed where wheat was grown: rye, barley and oats do not make good pastry, nor do rice or maize or potato starch.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The gluten content of the final wheat dough can be manipulated by the cook in a number of ways depending on the ultimate goal, whether it be sturdy bread or flaky pastry. (...) The first trick is to use exactly the right amount of water, for it is water that activates the gluten in flour. Fat is the second trick, and it helps the texture of pastry in a number of ways. Fat coats little packets of flour, waterproofing them and limiting the amount of water that gets in (less water, so less gluten), and it keeps the gluten strands 'short'. Little smears and gobbets of fat also separate the mini layers of dough, so that they form individual flakes or crumbs, not a solid mass.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Like flours, not all fats are created equal. Oil is fat that is liquid at room temperature but good pastry cannot be made with oil. Flour simply absorbs the oil and the resulting dough is mealy, not tender and flaky. The ideal fat for pastry-making is one with a high melting point because the longer it takes for the fat to melt, the longer it keeps the little parcels of dough separate, generating little packets of steam to puff and lighten the dough. Pig fat (lard) has a high melting point and very little water content, so is ideal on both counts.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“As far as a time-frame for these developments goes, we can probably reasonably deduce that the pie began its life some time before the fourteenth century in those areas of Europe where wheat was grown and pigs and cattle reared.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“Wheat from northern Italy is 'soft' - that is, it is already low in gluten so is ideal for pastry-making. Butter was the fat of choice for cooking in northern Italy (and a sign of wealth), compared with the oil of the south of the country, and there is no doubt that butter makes the finest pastry for sweet pies and tarts. (...) The situation in Britain was different. In Britain, butter was food for the poor. The wealthy in Britain preferred lard, maybe because the animal had to be killed to obtain the fat, thus its perceived value was higher. Lard makes superb huge 'raised' or 'standing' pies full of meat, which flourished to become one of the jewels in England's culinary crown.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“When was the last time you saw on a menu a chewet (a small, round pie of finely chopped meat or fish, with spices and fruit, 'made taller than a marrow pie'), a dowlet (a small pie of particularly dainty little tidbits), a herbelade or hebolace (a pie with pork mince and herb mixture), a talemouse (a sort of cheesecake, sometimes triangular in shape) or a vaunt (a type of a fruit pie)? these words (and more) were once everyday words in a baker's vocabulary. The only conclusion it is possible to draw is that the loss of so many pie-words reflects the loss of the pies themselves.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The importance of the pie - once the 'meat and potatoes' of the English - began to slip with the increased cultivation of the actual potato in the nineteenth century. As the nineteenth became the twentieth century, social changes pushed the pie further into decline. The 'great pies' had their last glorious days in the English manor houses of the Edwardian era, before the domestic classes left to fight the First World War.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The strangely marvellous thing is that, we refuse to relinquish the pie. We cling to the idea of it with some fervour, in spite of its fading reality on our tables. Why is it so? What is it about pies?”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The original pie served three very useful functions in acting as a baking, carrying and preserving container.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“When Soyer said of pies that they are 'one of our best companions du voyage through life', he was referring consumers, but he might just as well been referring to his professional colleagues, for pies have always been enormously useful to caterers and cooks, particularly at events where a large number must be fed efficiently. In modern times this is usually at sporting events such as football games, but the original experts in mass catering were the military.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“At a simple biological level, before dietitians were invented, our noses decided what was best to eat: if it smelled good, it was almost certainly good to eat.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“When the pies were taken out of the oven, melted fat was poured in through a hole in the lid to exclude air, thus preserving the contents. Once the pie was cut this airtight seal was broken, leaving the contents prone to rapid spoilage - which perhaps gave rise to the old superstition that it is unlucky to take just one slice from a pie.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“In modern society, where anyone in theory can make money, it is difficult to appreciate that once upon a time wealth was tied absolutely to social class, and therefore social class determined what you ate, even to the extent of determining the type of pastry making up your pie. Farming and household manuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries clearly instructed that the piecrust for the master's family be made from the finest wheat flour, whereas for the servants' piecrust the second milling of wheat or barley was to be used, or maslin (a mix of wheat and rye) or rye.”
― Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History

“The growth of wealth in the Western world, like that in Japan or China, has long been based on the international division of labor and the feverish exploitation of natural and human resources worldwide. All these accumulations of wealth that have taken place on our planet depend on a global economic system, and it is at that level that the question of justice should be raised and the march toward equality pursued.”
― Thomas Piketty, A Brief History of Equality

“It may not be the first line of defense of democratic societies, but it is actually quite near the front because an understanding of history heightens our ability to pierce through the fogs of willful misinformation that constitute lying.”
― Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters