With many beautiful fruits grown on the Western Slope and a rich agriculture heritage,
the Centennial State has plenty of options. But the Internet choice will likely surprise you.
On the Internet the other day, I found an article titled “The Most Iconic Pie in Every State,” and I couldn’t help myself. I had to stop and slowly click through the pictures of the delicious desserts.
It was on a site called “The Daily Meal,” which I know nothing about, but if the computer loads quickly enough, I always find that kind of story and the click-click-click presentation entertaining. You know the type: the best burger in every state, America’s best ice cream shops, your state’s most charming retro diner. I always pay close attention to Colorado (of course), Alaska (where my sister lives and because it’s close to the front of the list), Nebraska (where my mother was born and raised and fell in love) and Indiana (my dad’s home state). Then if I still have time and my computer is still working, I cruise through the other states.
I wondered if I could guess Colorado’s most iconic pie, but I was thrown for a loop on this one.
My first guess: rhubarb, or strawberry-rhubarb because everyone I know loves a good rhubarb pie. My nephew used to go to Village Inn every Wednesday with his buddies for a cup of coffee (which he paid for) and a free slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie. That’s once a week. Every week. Every single Wednesday. You just don’t do that for any old pie.
We used to have rhubarb growing in our backyard, but one year my brother mowed it down with the lawnmower when he was cutting the lawn. He thought it was an errant plant (aka a big weed), but since he was doing a solid for our dad, no one was too mad about it. Then a couple years later, after it had struggled back to viability, I mistakenly sprayed it with weed killer. It never came back from that. I had intended to buy a rhubarb plant this summer and give it another go, but somehow that didn’t happen. And, you know, you can buy almost anything at the grocery story these days.
Rhubarb pie, it turns out, is the most iconic pie in Washington, not Colorado. Washington also claims to produce more commercial rhubarb than any other state, so I guess that makes some sense.
My second guess was cherry pie. Cherries used to be a big crop in Colorado, especially Northern Colorado, and there were cherry trees all over Loveland (the town just to the south of here). When my aunt Janet was a neophyte home ec teacher in the 1950s at Loveland High, she lived in a motel across the road from Lake Loveland and the backyard of that hotel was thick with cherry trees. We used to get free rein in those trees when we would visit her, a sweet memory for my siblings and me, but I think she traded picking and pitting cherries for part of her rent, so by the end of cherry season she was over cherries. She didn’t stay in Loveland very long. I wonder if that’s why.
At one time, cherry production was a major agricultural interest in Northern Colorado. Between 1904, when the first crop was planted, according to the Loveland Reporter-Herald, and the height of the area's cherry production, as many as half a million trees were in production, 27.2 million bushels were harvested each year, and there were as many as five canning operations in Loveland alone. But the cherry industry began fading after World War II, due to varying degrees to the lack of canning equipment, hard late-season freezes and blight.
You can still find cherry cider and cherry jam and sometimes cherry pie in tourist shops up Big Thompson Canyon on the way to Estes Park, but cherries in Colorado are now yesterday’s crop. Still I thought, maybe.
Turns out cherry pie is the most iconic pie in Michigan, which produced 264 million pounds of tart cherries and 24,000 tons of sweet cherries in 2018.
So if not rhubarb or cherry, maybe apple? Apples used to be a big crop across Colorado — according to NPR’s Science Friday, by the 1920s there were as many as 400 varieties of apples grown in Colorado (as many as 1,400 across the U.S., which clearly was all about the apple-a-day lifestyle). In the late 1800s, Colorado was one of the top apple producers in the country; but interestingly, three-quarters of those apples were grown for cider, so when Prohibition passed, Colorado’s apple crop was brought to its knees. There are still apples grown in Colorado; the climate here is uniquely suited to growing the sweet fruit so lots of people have apple trees in their backyards. Most commercial orchards are on the Western Slope and in southern Colorado, but across the state, farmers are trying to resurrect heirloom varieties, such as the Winesap, Arkansas Black and the Sweet Chopin, and the cider industry has seen a resurgence in recent years.
When I was in high school in Colorado Springs, we used to drive to Penrose to buy bushel baskets of apples. We didn’t pick them — I don’t even know if that was an option — but the drive down there in the autumn colors and the crisp cooling air after a long hot summer was nice and the warehouses were full of all sorts of apple-y treats. The aroma of fresh picked apples, piled high in boxes and colorful baskets, was so sweet it was almost overwhelming. We took those apples home and put them in lunches or ate them for snacks, made baked apples and apple sauce and apple pie.
My dad likes his apple pie with a slice of cheddar cheese, but apple pie is not Colorado’s iconic flavor. That distinction goes to Minnesota, where the Honeycrisp apple was developed, and to Washington, D.C.
So my fourth guess (which I know is probably cheating since most guessing games only give you three tries) was the peach pie. When you come right down to it, I don’t know why that wasn’t my first guess because Palisade peaches are definitely a thing in this state. Peach season is akin to summer festivals, birthday parties and Christmas all rolled into one, people love peaches so much. Not just any peach, though, Palisade peaches, which happens to be Colorado’s state fruit. (Had I known there was such a thing, I might have been able to guess that.) Palisade peaches are grown in the Grand Valley on the Western Slope, in and around
Palisade peaches are perfectly fragrant, perfectly fuzzy, perfectly luscious and juicy. They are not, however, the fruit of Colorado’s most iconic pie.
the little town of Palisade, where the days are hot-hot-hot and the nights cool and caressing. The extreme temperature fluctuations are said to be the perfect climate for the peaches’ sugars to develop. The fruit is picked ripe from the trees and, though big grocery chains offer them for a few short weeks at the end of the summer, they’re often sold at roadside stands and farmers markets — to the tune of $11.7 million per year, according to the 2020 USDA Agricultural Overview.
Palisade peaches are perfectly fragrant, perfectly fuzzy, perfectly luscious and juicy. They are not, however, the fruit of Colorado’s most iconic pie. Strangely enough, Georgia’s most iconic pie isn’t the peach pie either; Georgia likes a delicious buttermilk pie. Delaware — who woud’a guessed it? — has a preference for peach pies.
So give up?
I did --— and for good reason. If I had guessed every fruit grown in nature and every sweet treat concocted by man, I would never have guessed this. According to The Most Iconic Pie in Every State (thedailymeal.com), Colorado’s most iconic pie — as determined by the number of recipe searches on the Internet — is the Spaghetti Pie.
Crazy, huh?
I kind of lost faith, tenuous as it was, in this list after reading that.
I have lived in Colorado my whole life. After that one night when I was, like, 5 years old and I refused to eat the spaghetti my mother fixed for dinner and family lore says my dad, irritated by his stubborn, said sit there until you eat it so I sat there all evening, I have been a big spaghetti fan. I like it with canned grocery store sauce or “gravy” simmered on the stove all day, with meat sauce or meatballs or spicy sausage and pepperoni, homemade noodles, Martha Gooch or American Beauty pasta, fancy restaurant fare, baked at a quick, casual joint with the cheese bubbling on top, even leftovers.
However, I have never heard of Spaghetti Pie — and in this beautiful, rich, nurturing state where we celebrate Palisade peaches and Olathe Sweet sweet corn like they’re manna from heaven, where we revere our agricultural roots with stock shows and county fairs and rodeos, I reject that pasta in a pie plate would be our favorite pie.
But I made it.
And it was good.
So, there’s that.
Other iconic pies
► Indiana: Sugar Cream Pie (aka Hoosier Pie)
► Alaska: Salmon Pie
► Nebraska: Runza (come on, man, that’s not even a pie)
► Wyoming: Plum Pie
The Best of Colorado
► Colorado’s Best Burger (The Daily Meal): Steuben’s in Denver
► Best Place for Ice Cream (The Daily Meal): Little Man Ice Cream in Denver
► Colorado’s Most Charming Retro Diner (loveFOOD): Pete’s Diner in Denver
► Best Tourist Attraction in Colorado (Attractions of America): Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs
► Most Iconic Food in Colorado (Food Network): Lamb chops
► Best Place for Pie in Colorado (Taste of Home): The Huckleberry in Louisville
The Pie:
Colorado’s Iconic Spaghetti Pie
One of the reasons Spaghetti Pie became iconic in Colorado, according to the Daily Meal, is because the recipe was included in the Junior League of Denver’s 1978 “Colorado Cache Cookbook.” There was some buzz around that cookbook when it was first published, which is unusual for a regional cookbook not written by a celebrity. My mother, who loved cookbooks, had that one and liked it enough to buy four of the other five the Junior League put out. (The sixth book came out in 2019, years after my mother’s death.)
The recipe for Spaghetti Pie in “Colorado Cache” is simpler than the one I made, requiring only sausage and tomato paste and forgoing the tomato, peppers and cottage cheese, as well as the fresh garlic and oregano.
If I was going to make this pie again, instead of using one pound of ground beef and half a pound of sausage, I would alter the mixture so there was more sausage, or I would use a spicier sausage. Also, I might try baking the pasta “crust” for a little while — say 10 or 15 minutes — before topping it with the meat and cheeses, making a slightly crispier crust that was more reminiscent of a pie.
This is a recipe that would be easy to double and which — according to all accounts — freezes well (before baking), so if you’re the type of person who likes to cook for the week ahead, you might want to try it. However, worth noting, this is a rich, hearty pie; so although the recipe says it makes six servings, eight pieces seem like a better serving size — unless you’re really hungry!
The Recipe
9 ounces spaghetti
2 tablespoons butter
2 eggs, beaten
½ cup grated gruyere cheese
1½ cup cottage cheese
1½ pounds ground beef or 1½ pounds combination of ground beef and sausage
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
½ red pepper, chopped
½ yellow pepper, chopped
1 can (28 ounces) diced tomatoes, drained
1 can (6 ounces) tomato paste
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons fresh oregano, chopped, or 1 teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1½ cup mozzarella, grated
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Brown meat with onions, garlic and peppers
Stir in tomato paste and diced tomatoes.
Add sugar and oregano.
Season with salt and pepper.
Cook spaghetti until al dente (about 10 minutes in boiling, salted water). Pasta should be slightly soft but chewy and still firm. Drain and return to pot.
While pasta is still hot, mix in butter, beaten eggs and gruyere cheese.
Grease 10-inch pie plate and then spread spaghetti mix evenly in the pie plate to form the “crust.”
Place dollops of cottage cheese on the spaghetti and then spread until it covers the whole pie. Spoon meat mixture over the cottage cheese and spread evenly. (It’s advisable to do about a quarter of the mixture at a time.)
Bake uncovered for about 35 minutes. (If you are cooking from frozen, add about 20 minutes to the cook time.)
Top with mozzarella and then cook for another 10 minutes, until the cheese is melted and bubbly. If you want, place the pie under the broiler for 3-5 minutes to blister and brown the cheese.
Note: You might want to place a cookie sheet beneath the pie while it is cooking to prevent the filling and cheese from overflowing onto the bottom of your oven.
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