As a young man, I made a mock apple pie for some friends.

“This is really good,” one of them said. “What kind of apples did you use?”

“None.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I used no apples. None. Instead of apples, I used Ritz crackers.”

There was a chorus of disbelief.

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“I’ll prove it,” I said, carefully removing the top crust from a piece, revealing a cracker that had maintained its round, scalloped shape. There were still disbelievers in the group, so I showed them the recipe printed on the back of a box of Ritz.

The modern name is mock apple pie, but early on, it had other names: cracker pie, Boston pie, and no-apple pie, to name but three.

Why would you want to make an apple pie that contained no apples? Two reasons. One, you have no apples. Two, you want to mess with your friends and family by serving something that looks and tastes like apple pie but is missing the primary ingredient.

There are variations of the recipe, but most consist of crackers, water, sugar, cream of tartar, lemon juice, butter, and cinnamon. Put together in the proper proportions and baked in a pie crust, the result will fool both your eye and your taste buds.

Today, we live in a time of apple abundance. Almost every grocery store has an apple section where any time of the year, you can buy varieties from Cortland to Winesap. In Maine, orchards will sell you apples by the bushel. But earlier generations were not blessed with such year-round availability. When your apples were used up, there would be no more until next year’s harvest.

There is solid evidence that mock apple pies were popular in the 1800s. Ships in the British Royal Navy made them as early as 1812. American pioneers crossing the plains baked them over campfires. Even city folk made them. Recipes were published in cookbooks and newspapers in the mid-1800s. This, of course, was before the time of Ritz, so soda crackers, hardtack, and even bread were used.

Mock apple pies are associated with Ritz crackers because Nabisco (short for National Biscuit Company) began printing the recipe on the back of Ritz boxes in 1935 and continued to do so, until the early 1990s. Though no longer printed on the boxes, copies of their recipe are easy to find online.

Crackers are not the only way to fake an apple pie. In the Little House books, Caroline Ingalls made mock apple pie using green pumpkin. If you have zucchini, you can use that to make what is called a zapple pie. Just like the kind made with crackers, these can be convincingly apple-like.

I’ve not tried it, but I saw a mock apple pie recipe using (are you sitting down?) green tomatoes. A woman said that if her garden is producing too many tomatoes, she’ll thin out some green ones and fool friends and family with them.

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