Apple pie and the Fourth of July

John T. Edge gives the classic its due in this breezy and informative read. One in a series of books on beloved food items, including fried chicken, hamburgers and French fries, and doughnuts, "Apple Pie: An American Story" looks at the history and folklore of an iconic dessert, from its English origins in the 14th century to its current status among food fans across the United States.

From Oxford, Miss., where he directs the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, Edge travels to Washington state, where "growers harvest more than fifteen billion apples each year." That is a whole lot of pie.

The author also heads to the Midwest and Southwest. In Iowa City, he checks out the Hamburg Inn, an old-school diner that serves apple-pie shakes. "Chock-full of crust fragments and crushed apple slices, the shake calls to mind a better class of Dairy Queen Blizzard," he writes. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, he spends time at Señor Pie, tasting "apple pies spiked with fiery green chiles."

In Florida, though, Edge runs into "the dark side of pie." A judge in the National Pie Championships, held during the Great American Pie Festival in Celebration, Florida, he finds representatives from Sara Lee, Entenmann's, and Mrs. Smith's "pimping freezer-case pies." He watches children make pastry dough from scratch, only to later use canned pie filling. He worries about our culinary future.

(A version of this review appeared originally on www.culinate.com.)