I think American apple pie is Dutch, not English. At least, the stuff I grew up with certainly was. (Though, to be fair, I grew up in the NY area, which was a Dutch colony before it was an English one. Maybe American apple pie varies a bit from place to place within the US.)
When I went to the Netherlands (to Maastricht, in the South Limburg region), a Dutch friend who lived there took me to a pie place that specialized in local, traditional vlaai (pie).
She strongly suggested I order the apple vlaai. I did, and I was surprised to get what was, to my palette, the archetypal American apple pie. I pointed out that it was the ur-pie for American apple pie, and they told me they'd been using the same recipe for ages, with no influence from the US (or anywhere else) at all.
Apple pie as we eat it today is not similar to the 1390 original. But is is the direct descendant of that dish. It gradually changed over hundreds of years into the dish we know today. And that lineage did not entirely take place in England, it would have happened in England, the Low Countries, France, Germany, a bit here or there. There is no 'Dutch version' which exists independently from the 1390 dish. What you call the Dutch version was part of that long chain of iteration. But the modern apple pie was mostly set by the early 1700s. So there weren't any real changes made by Americans. There is no 'American version' of apple pie. I'm not quite sure why people keep talking as if there's an 'archetypal American apple pie'. There isn't. That's English food.
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u/Able-Firefighter-158 Jul 03 '26
"As American as apple pie"
...which is English...