It's gloppy, it's soggy, it's un-American.

It is thought in certain circles that the Pennsylvania Dutch created the modern, curiously engineered American pie from these rock-hard early models. People who have sat in chairs made by the Pennsylvania Dutch may find this theory very credible. At this point, though, "American"-style pie is something of a relic: Where the civilized world has moved past its awkward bread-casket age to head in more refined directions, pie stands still. Our modern pie of piled fruit stewing in a shell of fragile dough is not an innovation but a replica of something primitive—piled meat entombed in hard crust—nudged in the vague direction of dessert.

It's not hard to see why this odd product requires an elaborate mythology to justify itself. We eat sweet pie at Thanksgiving on the premise that it captures the cuisine of colonial America. It does nothing of the kind. Sweet pie didn't gain wide popularity until the 19^th century, when it was eaten largely as a daytime pastry (in A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain included sweet pies in a list of things he missed about his homeland, along with several other pastries and cakes), and the full American pie menu, in all of its moods and seasons, did not come into being till the 20^th. American as apple pie, the phrase and concept, entered our lexicon in the late and cosmopolitan throes of the Jazz Age. The most American thing about pie, in fact, may be its retroactive claim of folksy authenticity and early dominance.

Today, this myth of historical continuity inspires many people to take pie as a given, though it makes little sense as a 21^st-century dessert. In an era of refrigeration, produce shipping, and advanced kitchen tools, there's little in a pie that would not be better out of a pie. Who but a sadist would take a basket of ripe seasonal fruit and bake it into mush? Who would labor over flaky pastry crust that's destined to get soaked before it's ever tasted? Unlike the tart, which sits low and topless in a shallow pan with a svelte layer of topping, pie requires a hefty piece of bakeware with outward-sloping sides, practically dooming the pastry to collapse. And unlike a torte—a short and modest cake combining fruit and nuts in balanced proportions—most modern pies rely on giant reservoirs of loose filling or inches of piled custard and whipped cream. A slice of strawberry tart with coffee is the perfect overture to a postprandial drink, a late conversation, or a night of love. Eat an oozing slice of strawberry pie, and it's time to look for Tums and go to bed.

Pie seems to know what it is up against. Every now and then over the past half-century, it has slid into the limelight with strange, somewhat desperate promises of sex. Most recently and prominently, the ruttish American Piefarces took as their essential premise an equivalence between pie and the straits of carnal exploration. This is an insult to the erotic act. If passion were consummated as pie is consumed, it would require hours of preparation, fall apart in process, and be an open invitation to invasion by ants.