ABC Apple Pie

Written for elementary school readers, this book follows an apple pie and the townspeople who each want a taste, and each goes about it in their own way. It is built on an 18th-century rhyme, so young readers can practise the alphabet and past-tense verbs as they read. Spanish vocabulary is woven in too, giving children a chance to pick up some Spanish along the way.

The rhyme itself was a children's teaching piece that taught the order of the alphabet. Peter and Iona Opie's The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd edition, Oxford and New York, 1997, pp. 53-4) traces its history. The earliest known mention appears in a religious text from 1671, which used only the letters A to G. The first printed version came out in Child's New Plaything, in London in 1742 and in Boston in 1750. Tom Thumb's Playbook carried it in London in 1747 and in Boston in 1764, both aimed at early learners.

The best-known edition is A Apple Pie by Kate Greenaway, published in London in 1886. Her illustrations helped it reach a wide audience in Britain and abroad, and it has been reprinted many times in the United States. In the 18th century, I and J were not told apart, nor were U and V, so the early versions leave out those two vowels. Later printings added them with the lines "I inspected it" and "U upset it."