Thanksgiving taste testers ate lots of pie to see if ancient recipes hold up

Thanksgiving means one thing: pie. And lots of it.

The UC Berkeley Library scoured its collection of 900 cookbooks to find old recipes for Thanksgiving pies and then baked them and put them to the test.

The library went deep and found a recipe for “pompkin” pie from the 1796 cookbook, American Cookery — the first known cookbook written by an American, according to the library.

Other recipes tested included a sweet potato pie from What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking from 1881 and quince pie from the 1940 book The Martha Washington Cook Book. Read more…

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