Life of Pie Trivia Quiz

Answer: Hannah Glasse

It has been suggested that the requirement to "first catch your hare" owes its origin to one of the ingredients of jugged hare in Hannah Glasse's recipe: fresh hare's blood. Cooking in the 18th century was not for the faint of heart. Her "pye" recipe sounds delicious, however, and can be made with either apples or pears.

Although Martha Washington (nee Dandridge) was cooking the same sort of foods as the young bride of Daniel Parke Custis in 1749 - and would have considered herself English before the American Revolution - we can logically eliminate her as a choice, since she is considered American and her cookbook contains the Custis family recipes given to her as a wedding present, presumably with no hare catching duties required.

Answer: mincemeat pie

A version of "Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery and Booke of Sweetmeats" annotated by food historian Karen Hess gives readers a wonderful view of what well-to-do Americans ate in the late 18th century. While Martha may not have written the recipes, she was a faithful steward of this treasure of the Custis family heritage, and she passed the manuscript along to her granddaughter Eleanor Parke Custis on the occasion of the younger woman's marriage, just as it had been given to her.

The list of ingredients for mincemeat pie overlap somewhat with the other choices, but plum pudding and fruitcake are not pies, and apple pie doesn't include veal and suet.

Answer: sweet potato pie

Sweet potatoes and yams are a traditional Southern food, and can be prepared in many different ways: sweet potato casserole, candied sweet potatoes, sweet potato fries, etc. Cooks use similar spices in sweet potato and pumpkin pies, and while the texture of the two pies differ, they taste very much the same and are served on similar occasions, especially at Thanksgiving, which falls in November in the United States. Shoofly pie is a Pennsylvania Dutch pastry, similar to the English treacle tart, but shoofly pie is made with molasses and brown sugar rather than treacle. Cornbread is a traditional Southern food; however, recipes for "cornbread pie" simply use cornbread as a topping for various meat casseroles.

Answer: two whole pheasants

The royal family didn't actually shoot the pheasants used in the recipe prepared for the yearly British Pie Week contest, held in March, but their well-known tradition provides a hint to the correct response. The winning "Wheatley House Pie" called for two whole pheasants, and even the bones of the birds were used when making the stock to moisten and flavor the pie filling. According to the contest's website, the recipe for one of the finalists of the pub pie contest - "Horn to Heel Pie" - uses "one cow heel" and diced chuck steak (though not any cow horns) and includes "125ml Thwaites Bomber Ale (or other real ale of your choice)" along with veggies and seasonings.

Answer: cherry pie

There are over 1,000 varieties of cherry trees, and cherries had long been enjoyed by people of ancient times before the Greek writer Theophrastus mentioned them in writing in the 3rd century B.C. Cherry pits were brought to the Americas for planting in the 1600s, and a century later, Parson Weems's legend that George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree and refrained from telling a lie was not questioned, at least in terms of the presence of cherry trees on Virginia plantations. The cherry trees prized for their blossoms are not the sweetest to eat, but their beauty is cultivated for its own value, especially in Japan.

Answer: Cornish pasties

To make Cornish pasties, plain pastry is rolled into a circle, filled with finely chopped meat, onion, and root vegetables, and then folded over into a semi-circle. Miners could hold one end of the small pie in their soiled hands, then discard the part they had touched, without getting the filling and the top part of the crust dirty. (In fact, in the early history of pie, the crust was often discarded, only serving to protect the filling.) While its origins are in Cornwall, in the southwestern part of England, the Cornish pasty is popular throughout the UK. Gloucestershire squab pie is a West Country dish, but it is made with lamb, rather than the bird its name implies. Cheddar cheese and Somerset apples are also foods found in the western part of England.

Answer: The water should be cold.

Cold water keeps the butter from melting, and it helps to make sure the butter is cold, as well. According to the Food Network, if the fat is not kept cool, moisture from the warm butter causes gluten to be released from the flour, making the pastry tough rather than light.

The baker also has to be careful not to use too much water, because this too will affect the consistency of the pastry.

Answer: pecan pie

Most recipes for "traditional" pecan pie call for Karo Corn Syrup, and numerous sources point out that recipes for pecan pie did not appear in cookbooks before the 20th century. However, pecan trees grew in abundance in the deep south at the time Europeans began to arrive in North America, and that remarkable survivor, early Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, observed that "the Karankawa Indians sat under pecan trees when the nuts were ripe and did little else for weeks but crack and eat them" The word "pecan" - the source of many arguments about its pronunciation - is said to be from the Algonquian language group, spoken at one time by a large number of Native American peoples, and essentially means a hard nut to crack.

Answer: False

Historians explain that the Pilgrims lacked the kind of ovens needed to bake the sort of pumpkin pies traditional to Thanksgiving today, although the Native Americans introduced the Pilgrims to squash and pumpkin (not the other way around), which were already important sources of nutrition in America and may have saved the lives of the English settlers who survived the first winter. Pilgrims may have roasted a sort of pudding over the fire, using the pumpkin shell itself as a container, rather than putting it inside a pastry shell. Pumpkins quickly entered the diets of Europeans.

In one of the earliest English recipes for pumpkin pie, in the 1670s, pieces of "pumpion" were dipped in eggs and herbs, fried, and placed "into a Pie with Butter, Raisins, Currans, Sugar and Sack, and in the bottom some sharp Apples" - a rather chunky difference from today's custardy version.

Other early recipes mashed and strained the pumpkin, however, and used methods and ingredients similar to those used to make the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas pies today.

Answer: The heart, liver, and other internal organs of an animal, originally a deer.

Umbles are the parts of the deer (or the domestic animal) that are left over after the nobility have been offered the choice cuts of venison from the hunt. The heart, the liver, the lungs, the tongue, the feet, the brain, and anything else the peasants could stomach (or the dogs didn't eat) would be tossed together into a savory pie. So the idiom describes someone with a sense of self-importance who has been brought down to the lowest social class and has become one who must eat "humble" (or umble) pie.

However, one source (offering recipes) argues that the "pluck" or "offal" was often considered choice pickings.