A flaky, golden crust, with apple juices bubbling through its vents and the scent of cinnamon wafting upward.

Apple pie serves as my quintessential comfort food, and it stands as the sole dish my family consistently prepares together: kneading the dough, crimping the crust’s edges, and peeling and dicing the apples.

My mother, the guardian of our oven's flame, has hinted that she would go to great lengths to protect her Grandma Fleischer's recipe.

When my then-girlfriend first came home and we baked a pie together, my mother told her that she would now have to marry me.

(She did, perhaps out of fear of just desserts.)

That the delicacy did not originate in America was beside the point; we claimed it as gastronomic manifest destiny.

Colonists introduced apples, Johnny Appleseed spread them far and wide, and we became an apple pie nation.

"Mom and apple pie" — shorthand for beloved, quintessential Americana — recurs throughout journalists' accounts of the past century.

Soldiers in both world wars yearned for apple pie.

A Texan mother sent one to the Soviet headquarters in Manhattan for a visiting Nikita Khrushchev, causing a bomb scare that shut down several midtown blocks.

The 1960s were marked by overseas conflicts, political assassinations, and profound social unrest at home.

Amidst this turmoil, McDonald's offered a form of solace in the rectangular guise of a fried apple pie.

I came to understand that era—and that pastry—through my post-World War II American history course.

During the first week, we had to submit something that symbolized America.

With my conventional, apple-pie-and-motherhood outlook, I turned in a photo of a bald eagle.

Mr. Bill Schechter, a counterculture enthusiast, was clearly not impressed.

Then two girls presented a McDonald's apple pie, representing how corporations and consumerism had replaced home cooking.

Mr. Schechter jumped up from his chair and put the small box on top of his blackboard, both to remind them of the lesson and to test how long the pie would last, given all the preservatives.

Years later, the pie 'looked as fresh as ever,' Mr. Schechter said by email.

He reminded me that apple pies were Jack Kerouac's primary sustenance on his eye-opening cross-country journey in 'On the Road' — not the McDonald's kind.

That mass-produced pie captures the moment I began to see America differently — as a place riddled with tensions and conflicts, where most ordinary people are decent and preserve sweetness, yet live under the shadow of formidable and sometimes sinister forces.

McDonald’s has revived its fried apple pie to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

Like Kerouac, I shall remain loyal to what is made from scratch.

Just refrain from inquiring about the secret recipe.

The newspaper clippings were compiled through research conducted by Sarit Hand, the corporate archivist at the Associated Press.

They form part of an ongoing series titled “American Objects,” which commemorates the 250th anniversary of the United States.

For further installments in the “American Objects” collection, please click here.

For additional coverage of the anniversary, please click here.