A pie is a very old, traditional kind of food in many places around the world.

It may have begun as a kind of long-lasting food for people on long journeys thousands of years ago. In the Stone Age there was no means of preserving food, and people had to scavenge the food they needed as they went along, for example, by picking berries.

Then people learned how to grind corn and bake it, or even take it in dry powdered form as flour, and cook it on their travels. Egyptian sailors carried a flat bread loaf of millet bread called dhourra cake, and the Romans had a biscuit called buccellum.

However, about 2000 BC, the biscuit was given a filling. We know this because a recipe for chicken pie was written on a tablet in ancient Sumer (now modern Iraq).

When fat (such as lard, oil or butter) is added to a flour-water paste it becomes a pastry and does not go hard like bread.

The pastry of the kind we know today was developed by the Ancient Greeks. They used it to holed fruit fillings. The Romans made pastry to cover meats and fowls which were baked. But they used it as we would use sheets of aluminium foil today – to keep the jounces in the meat. They called it placenta, and after cooking they then threw the pastry away!

But they did then develop a pastry which was much richer in fat, and this they did eat. The point about the pastry case was that it preserved the fruit or meat filling, and so it could be taken on journeys.

Over the centuries, this travelling pie was developed in many different ways. The most famous is the Cornish pasty. This potato and vegetable pie (sometimes with meat if it could be afforded), was used as a packed lunch for tin miners going down the mines. It is a sheet of pastry drawn up around a dollop of filling, and then crimped at the pastry join. The idea was that the miners could hold the joined seam with their dirty fingers, then throw it away when they had eaten the rest of the pasty.

The Pilgrim fathers and early settlers took their pie recipes with them to America, adapting to the ingredients to what they found. Their first pies were based on berries and fruits collected around their first settlements.