Easy as pie

My 2010 Pi Pie

Happy Pi Day! In celebration of Pi Day¹, and its auspicious landing on a Thursday, I offer to you this very large helping of pie-themed things. Mmmm, pie.

• Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie: a line from the nursery rhyme Sing of song of sixpence²:
  

  Sing a song of sixpence
  a pocket full of rye
  four and twenty blackbirds
  baked in a pie

• Little Jack Horner: Another nursery rhyme with pie.
  

  Little Jack Horner
  Sat in the corner,
  Eating a Christmas pie;
  He put in his thumb,
  And pulled out a plum,
  And said ‘What a good boy am I!



• Can she make a cherry pie?: A line from the folk song Billy Boy.
• pie in the sky: used to describe plans or hopes considered unrealistic and overly optimistic
• “high apple pie in the sky hopes”: a line from the song High Hopes, a song sung by Frank Sinatra
• as easy as pie: an expression meaning “very easy.” In my experience, pie is not the easiest thing in the world to make. It involves crust, an oven, preparation of ingredients.³
• “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe,” a quote by Carl Sagan
  
• As American as apple pie: an expression meant to describe something quintessentially American. Of course, many cultures have versions of apple pies.⁴ Apple pie has nevertheless achieved a place in American culture:
  

  Although apple pies have been eaten since long before the European colonisation of the Americas, “as American as apple pie” is a saying in the United States, meaning “typically American”.[14] In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, apple pie became a symbol of American prosperity and national pride. A newspaper article published in 1902 declared that “No pie-eating people can be permanently vanquished.”[15] The dish was also commemorated in the phrase “for Mom and apple pie” – supposedly the stock answer of American soldiers in World War II, whenever journalists asked why they were going to war.[16]

  (From the Apple Pie Wiki Page⁵.)

• American Pie: Don McLean’s signature song, first released in 1971. Bye-bye Miss American Pie… (I’m quite fond of this large-scale lip dub video version of the song produced by the city of Grand Rapids Michigan.)
• American Pie (1999): a movie that includes various analogies of sex and pie.
• pie-eyed: drunk
• piebald: having patches of black and white (or other colors), especially describing the coat of an animal.
• pie chart: a type of graph in which proportions of a whole (such as a whole data set) are depicted as wedges of a circle
  
• piece of the pie: an expression meaning a share in something, such as a reward or credit.
• mud pie: a pattie-shaped blob of mud, commonly made when playing in the mud
• sweetie pie: a common term of endearment
• cow pie: Not actually a pie made of cow (that would would be a beef pot pie), but a lump of cow manure. (Definitely not a term of endearment)
• pie in the face: a bit of slapstick comedy, usually involving a whipped cream pie. Just like it sounds, it involves someone getting a pie in the face.
• 10 banana cream pies: Sesame Street once featured a rather clumsy baker who would stand at the top of a flight of stairs, and announce the number of some sort of dessert he was holding, before falling and spilling all of them. He may not actually have used banana cream pies for 10, but the phrase seems to have stuck. (cf. the use on the show The Family Guy.)

Have more pies to bring to the table? Throw ’em in the comments.

¹ So-called, as the date (at least as it is written here in the US) is 3-14, is reminiscent of the number Pi’s initial 3 digits: 3.14. My past celebrations of Pi Day have included easy as pi, my personal gallery of Pi Pies, and a Pi-themed list.
²I was surprised to learn that this nursery rhyme was actual used by pirates to convey messages. This is the sort of thing that would usually send me to Snopes to check, but in this case Snopes is where I found it.
³ Toast is much easier to make.
⁴ I love tarte aux pommes as made in France. You know what was hard to get in France when I lived there, though? Doritos.
⁵Really. Apple pie has a Wiki page. So do pumpkin pie, pecan pie and cherry pie.
—
Images: Little Jack Horner and the king with the pie are both from Project Gutenberg.