"l, not -l" > wrote in message
...
>
> On 16-Oct-2011, "Storrmmee" > wrote:
>
>> i have read this thread with interest and a bit of horror, i think the
>> one
>>
>> reason to make it would be sorta like watching a train wreck, you want to
>> look away but can't, i simply can NOT imagine how this must taste,...
>> most
>>
>> things are just more or less interesting to my taste buds but this seems
>> just so ick, Lee
>
> Guess you wouldn't care much for vinegar pie either. 8-)
> Growing up in 1950s rural western-Kentucky I have eaten both and, at the
> time, they were a real treat.
>
> These are foods for people without much money and little access to fresh
> produce. America once had a large rural population that saw a trip to
> town
> as a special occasion and the "produce section" was a small plot of land
> "out back of the house" or the root cellar. You had apples every
> imaginable way (baked, fried, stewed, etc) when they were in season, you
> canned like mad at the end of the season and then tried to make the
> "canned"
> goods last through the winter. Most likely, you only had one or two apple
> trees and they weren't necessarily the best apples for making pies; they
> might have been best for eating out of hand or maybe making cider. They
> made a pie that wasn't anything like you get frozen from Mrs. Smith in
> today's supermarkets.
>
> Oddities, such as mock apple or vinegar pie, are for the dead of winter
> when
> all the produce from the garden (fresh and canned) is long gone and the
> grocery store is a "general store" in the middle of nowhere.

from http://members.cox.net/jjschnebel/mocaplpi.html

that recipe -- or one very much like it -- was invented around 1852 by a
group of pioneer women for their children who missed the apple pie they'd
had "back east." In Helen Evans Brown's West Coast Cookbook, she quotes
Mrs. B. C. Whiting's How We Cook In Los Angeles (1894), "The deception was
most complete and readily accepted. Apples at this early date were a dollar
a pound, and we young people all craved a piece of Mother's apple pie to
appease our homesick feelings." The recipe was referred to as "California
Pioneer Apple Pie, 1852", and the crackers used at that time were "soda
crackers" which were mixed with brown sugar, water and citrus acid and
cinnamon.

After Ritz crackers were created in the early 1930's a recipe for Mock Apple
Pie began appearing on the box. Apples were once again expensive and
homemakers in those years were once again able to use crackers in order to
give their children a taste of apple pie.



ok, well that finally explains those silly Ritz boxes, but why is this
recipe STILL around?