“’You must be a cook as well, then?’
‘Yes, once.’
‘Let me guess … pastries. Thin people always make good pastries.’
‘Remarkable,” he said looking at me admiringly. ‘Yes, I made pies.’
‘What?’
‘Pies.’ It’s the English word for ‘tartes.’
‘Oh.’
[…]
“A city that eats pies must be a city that speaks English.”
Binh and the Man on the Bridge first connect with their solitude, silence, and being Vietnamese. As their identities unfold with each question and answer, they are both revealed to each other to have been or be a cook, or patissière (or pie-tissière) in the Man’s case. Pies and tarts have come up as a common dessert in the Mesdames’ lives, either made by Miss Toklas herself, or by Binh. Miss Toklas combines the “traditional” American (apple) pie we know today with unconventional twists, like making her “apple pie” into more of an apple cake, “now filled with an applesauce-flavored custard and frosted with buttercream” (chapter 3, my Apple Book version of the novel has page numbers that change with the size of the app window). Whereas Binh takes the traditional French route and creates pastries using “Rectangular folds of puff pastry dough, circles of pâte brisée, bowls of heavy cream whipped with and without sugar, fresh fruit purées, fondant flowers and chocolate leaves” (ch. 9). He also makes a sort of “apple pie” for his Mesdames: “puff pastry fritters, [with] delicate shells for the molten apples within” (ch. 9). At dinner with the Man, Binh is presented with his first apple pie–“tart covered with a bumpy top crust. The aroma of cinnamon, unmistakable and insistent, especially when coupled with sugar and heat, surrounded us” (ch. 9). The slight differences in composition and preparation, as well as the origins of the words themselves, fit in with the concepts of colonialism (French, American; “pie,” “tarte”) and outside/inside (Binh being an outsider in his various environments, the pie/tart composition itself).
The key differences between a pie and a tart are that pies usually have a crust on top (and/or bottom) that is flaky, whereas tarts only have bottom crust and are firmer and more crumbly. Pies, tarts, and galettes are all quite similar in terms of ingredients (flour, butter, water), but differ in formation. Pies have a long history that dates back to the Neolithic Period. Early pies were more of a galette, basically a free-form pie. Galettes are baked flat, that is, without a tin/pan. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans made galettes with sweet fillings (honey) as well as savory meat fillings. Later in history, pies were usually prepared because the crust would serve as a vessel for the filling, or as a way of “preserving” the filling. Pie is an icon in American history, cuisine, and pop culture (“American Pie” by Don McLean, American Pie (1999)) thanks to the colonization of the New World. Pilgrims brought along English pie recipes that were a significant part of English cuisine. Thus, the well-known pie and Thanksgiving association. Pies gained popularity in America from the 1700s onwards, and apple pie was among one of the country’s favorites.
Gillingham, Sara Kate. “Pie vs. Tart: What’s the Difference?” Kitchn, Apartment Therapy, LLC., 5 Nov. 2008, www.thekitchn.com/pie-vs-tart-whats-the-differen-68710.
Mayer, Laura. “A Brief History of Pie.” Time, Time, 26 Nov. 2008, time.com/3958057/history-of-pie/.
Stradley, Linda. “History of Pies.” What’s Cooking America, 27 Jan. 2017, whatscookingamerica.net/History/PieHistory.htm.