Pie Day — er, Pi Day — is around the corner and what better way to celebrate the food holiday than indulging in a piece of the baked dish?
Even better, the warm weather means fresh fruit such as strawberries are already in season, with boysenberries, cherries and blackberries and apples following in the summer months.
The fruit-perfect weather and impending day of pie has led Gurney’s Seed and Nursery Company to find out what the most popular fresh fruit pie is across the nation.
“From strawberry to classic apple, we all have our favorite fruit pies at Gurney’s, and we wondered if America did, too,” the Greendale, Indiana-based mail-order seed and garden plant company said in a blog. “So we decided to find out. Using Google Trends search interest data, we found out which fruit pie is the most popular in every state and in the U.S. overall.”
Nationwide, strawberry pie takes the cake — or pie, rather — with 14 states adoring the filled pastry. Strawberry pie is also popular in the Midwest and the South. But when it comes to the Peach State, Google Trends data showed a surprising revelation.
Unlike the pie TasteAtlas proclaimed was the most popular one in Georgia last year, the most popular pie in the state isn’t peanut butter or even peach pie. It’s a dish more closely associated with its southern neighbor: key lime pie.
Key lime pie may be linked to Florida, but there is evidence that the treat may have originated from New York City-based milk company Borden. That led Key West residents to try to disprove the theory in 2018. At the time, the Miami Herald reported that “The Key West Key Lime Pie Cookbook” author David Sloan could only find a pie recipe dated to 1939.
Regardless, key lime pie isn’t a total stranger to Georgia. Kenny’s Great Pies in Smyrna has been selling metro Atlantans “island style” pies since 1989.
