Despite its prominent place in American food culture, there is very little uniquely “American” about apple pie. The popular dessert relies upon the English cookery technique of baking a filling between two crusts as a means of preserving food for a short time. While sugar is New World, the combination of other ingredients is Old World: apples, lemon, and various combinations of spices. The use of exotic spices like cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and cloves in pumpkin pie associates the dish with ancient trade routes between Europe and the east. Further, these spices hint at a relationship with the commonly recognized discovery of the Americas, the abortive search for a western route to the East Indies. Cookbooks published in the United States and Canada during the nineteenth century reveal how Old World culinary techniques and New World produce combined to create a North American cuisine that was simultaneously unique and heavily indebted to European influences. American author Sarah J. Hale’s 1852 edition of The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery is representative of this development. Hale’s cookbook included two recipes for apple pie, one marked as English and the other as American. Since apple pie is a long-established English baked good brought by the colonists to the New World, it is unsurprising that the English and American versions of apple pie provided by Hale are similar. Both call for apples sweetened with sugar and flavoured with lemon and spices between two layers of pastry baked in a moderate oven. The most significant difference is that the American pie is spiced with just cinnamon, while the English recipe calls for cloves and nutmeg. More significant differences emerge on the next page, where Hale provides two recipes for pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie possibly emerged from early American cooks making do with the ingredients available to them. Since pumpkins have a similar consistency to apples, some food historians have suggested cooks substituted them in traditional apple dishes. In Hale’s cookbook, the English version is reminiscent of the earliest versions of pumpkin pie composed of stewed pumpkin baked in a single pie shell and made palatable with sweeteners and spices. The American version is closer to the dessert item recognized today, a pumpkin custard flavoured with molasses, cinnamon and ginger. Hale’s 1852 debut novel, Northwood, declared pumpkin pie "an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving" and it is still among the most popular baked goods with 50 million pies baked and consumed in America each year, especially during the holiday season. In The Female Emigrant’s Guide and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping, Catherine Parr Traill discusses the differences between English and North American versions of pumpkin pie, “Now I must tell you, that an English pumpkin-pie, and a Canadian one, are very differently made," she writes, "and I must give preference, most decidedly, to the American dish; which is something between a custard and a cheese-cake in taste and appearance.” The pumpkin pie described by Traill was not merely an adaptation of American ingredients to an English dish, it also benefited from the culinary melting pot that brought together numerous world cuisines in North American kitchens. Waves of immigrants of the 19th century brought new culinary influences to both Canada and America, while recipes reflected these increasingly multinational influences. Most significantly, the influence of European immigrants assisted in the evolution of North American pie to the decadent desserts enjoyed today. Pie was suited to the primitive conditions of early settlement, since pies allowed the cook to stretch meagre provisions and the crust, which required less flour than bread and no special equipment to …