An excerpt from Who Cooked That Up? :
"April Fool!," my young neighbor cried with great glee. She had just baked a pie for her father, and she couldn't wait until he tasted it. It looked like apple pie. It tasted like apple pie, but there wasn't an apple in it. "It's made with Ritz crackers!," she announced triumphantly. He was appropriately impressed and declared she'd won the traditional tease.
It wasn't until some years later that I discovered that 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.
Today Mock Apple Pie is mostly a curiosity, but the Nabisco people still print it on Ritz boxes and publish it on a Website devoted to Ritz recipes. And, like all curiosities, as well as all World Wide Web pages, there are variations to be found. You can find a slightly different recipe for Mock Apple Pie with Nutmeg on a website devoted to Oddible Edibles. You might also enjoy trying a Ritzy Pecan Pie, using Ritz crackers, egg whites and pecans, as well as another Ritz Pecan Pie made with egg whites but which also includes some chocolate.
Who Cooked That Up? also has the originations of many other favorites, from deep-dish pizza to Cinncinnati Chili to English Toffee to well, you name it.
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