TBT: Celebrate Pi Day With One of These Pie Recipes!

When it comes to actual food pies, Ford Motor Company has multiple connections above and beyond the namesake graphs used to display various data. Founder Henry Ford was known to include apple pie with soybean sauce in his all-soy dinner menu for guests. For another example, former subsidiary Philco-Ford once produced home appliances, like ranges and ovens, as well as the refrigerators that would be used to store the leftovers.

But the most obvious crossover between the dessert food and the automaker comes from the nearly 200 different pie recipes that appeared in the pages of the Ford Times, a lifestyle and travel magazine published from 1908 through 1993. It was distributed by Ford Dealers and claimed the largest circulation of any magazine in the world during the mid-1970s.  

Many varieties of pies both savory and sweet, including several takes on pecan pie, were shared in the Ford Times’ recurring “Favorite Recipes of Famous Taverns” feature, which launched in 1946 as the magazine highlighted the recipes of more than 3,000 restaurants around the U.S. Those recipes were compiled into a series of cookbooks, including full-color photos or illustrations of their respective restaurants, beginning in 1950. The books sold over a million copies, some of which are still available online for resale, in nearly 30 years of publication.