From KCRW, I'm Evan Kliman and you're listening to good food.

Baking season lasts 365 days in my house, but with the holidays fast approaching

and now that it has finally dipped below 70

degrees in LA turning on the oven just feels right which is why we're

devoting today's show to baking, cookies, cakes, and of course pie.

It's been a few years since we last congregated in person to revel in our collective

pie obsession at Good Foods annual pie contest and I think that's why the need to parse the importance of pies has become even greater.

So I'm thrilled to be able to break intellectual bread with Rossi Anastapulo who took her obsession with the circular pastry to look at the history of our country.

Hi Rossi, welcome to good food. look at the history of our country.

Hi Rossi, welcome to good food.

I'm so happy I get to talk to another pie obsessive.

Yes, it's so great to be here.

You might say that pie is like baked into the US. When did we first start eating them?

So pie in the United States really started in what we think of as this country before we

were even a country. It came over with the first colonist who brought their own

history of pies in British and European culinary traditions

and when they arrived to these shores continue to bake them here, you know, using and

adapting to what they had, which wasn't always quite as expensive as they might have

had back home.

Things like apples didn't grow here when they first showed up.

Only crab apples were growing in North America.

So apple pie, even as we think about wasn't quite here at the

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