Truly nostalgic: McDonald’s new fried apple pie can’t live up to its lore

On Sunday, I made an unplanned stop at McDonald’s, hoping to get an early taste of the fried apple pie that’s making a brief return to the menu to mark America’s 250th birthday. It’s one of the secrets of Mickey D’s limited time offerings: They’re often available a couple of days before the official launch date.

Sure enough, two days before its formal comeback on Tuesday, the retro hand pie was hiding in plain sight under the “Sweets & Treats” tab on the electronic menu. It was camped out next to the Oreo McFlurry, hot fudge sundae and vanilla shake, just waiting for someone to discover it. The treat will temporarily supplant the baked apple pie, which for years has played the role of sad understudy, forced to take the stage in 1992 when McDonald’s decided the fried version no longer aligned with public tastes. The original pie had fallen victim to America’s low-fat craze.

I fondly remember the fried apple pie from childhood, but as I started to place my order, I had a sudden, secondary wave of nostalgia wash over me. I recalled that my father used to love the coffee at McDonald’s. He’s been gone for decades now, a victim of his own wretched tobacco habits. But any time the topic of coffee came up between us, Dad would remind me that the scalding hot Joe from the Golden Arches was his favorite. He was no coffee snob, unlike his son.

So, now I had something with which to wash down my pie: a tall cup of black coffee, industrial strength, just like my father liked it. It was Father’s Day, after all. I sucked down that corporate mud in memory of a Dad who had died more than 25 years ago. The coffee was bitter, and sweeter than I remember, which may be a metaphor for many of my childhood memories.

McDonald’s is many things to many people. Bogeyman in America’s obesity crisis. PlayPlace nanny for weary parents in need of a break (at least when PlayPlaces were commonplace). International symbol for everything wrong with the United States. Secret comfort when the only thing that will satisfy your craving is the salty edge of a french fry.

But for several generations now, McDonald’s has also marked time. As I sat down in one of the hard chairs inside the restaurant, I could plot moments in time just by examining the items before me. The pie’s sharp-cornered container, which boxed up my pastry like a coffin, had replaced the more supple holder from my youth — a thick paper sleeve that looked like a rectangle with large bites taken out of both ends. Back in the ’80s, I recall there was a small finger hole that allowed you to pop open one end of the box, releasing your pie in a sleek, sliding motion from its carton. If boxes were poems, the one from my youth was a sweet sonnet; the current one is a dirge.

The warning on my McCafe cup (“Caution HOT!”) was a reminder of the famous 1990s-era lawsuit in which a 79-year-old woman was awarded nearly $3 million in punitive damages after she suffered third-degree burns from a coffee spill on her lap. (A judge later reduced the damages, and both parties eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.) The case became, rather unfairly, the poster child for frivolous lawsuits. The plaintiff had been willing to settle for $20,000, but in its hubris, McDonald’s refused.

The same caution is stamped on the apple pie box, which recalls another case, in which a British man sued McDonald’s in 1995 after being “scarred for life” by the pastry’s blisteringly hot filling. (He settled for £750.) Yet countless other diners simply suffered the indignity inherent in the piping hot pocket: Generation X has plenty of war stories about losing skin after a McDonald’s apple pie torched the roof of their mouths.

Thirty years later, the warnings prove unnecessary. I ordered the pastry twice, and both times it was lukewarm at best. The obvious benefit (aside from keeping your mouth intact) is that you can eat the dessert immediately, no cooling period needed. You could also handle the pie with your hands to inspect the craters on its surface, a honeycomb of pastry-shell bubbles that had burst once removed from the fryer. (The lower temperature will also, no doubt, keep the consumer protection lawyers at bay.)

You can understand why McDonald’s reintroduced the treat for America’s birthday. Apple pie’s symbolism is too tantalizing to resist, even if the dish has European origins and predates the Declaration of Independence. The chain was scheduled to unveil a 35-foot fried apple pie monument Tuesday in Joliet. The statue will serve as a mile marker on Route 66 — and, perhaps, as a reminder that in today’s attention economy, a pocket-size pie may not be enough to attract eyeballs (and diners). You need a bombastically big roadside pastry, too.

Ray Kroc, the businessman who transformed McDonald’s from a small chain to multinational giant, understood the romance of the apple pie from the start. He had experimented with a pound cake and strawberry shortcake, but thought both “lacked glamor,” as he wrote in his 1977 memoir, “Grinding It Out.” He was ready to give up on dessert when Litton Cochran from East Tennessee developed the fried hand pie, fattened with diced apples. Cochran told Kroc it was an “old Southern favorite.”

The dessert had a “classiness in a finger food” that “made it perfect for McDonald’s,” Kroc wrote. “The pies added significantly to our sales and revenues.” The fried apple pie officially joined the menu in 1968, the same year the Big Mac was introduced. McDonald’s has tinkered with the apple pie recipe over the decades and, on occasion, even expanded the fruit fillings to include cherry, pineapple and pumpkin.

As with the baked version, the fried pie features a mix of six apple varieties: Fuji, Golden Delicious, Jonagold, Rome, Gala, and Ida Red, all sourced from American orchards. At least that’s the official story. Given each hand pie can be consumed in about four generous bites, I’m not sure six varieties could even fit inside a single pocket. I doubt my pies would have stood up to genetic testing, and I’m pretty sure there is an attorney somewhere just itching to challenge McDonald’s over this claim. It’s the American way.

The main question I had, however, was whether the fried apple pie itself would be transporting. Would it whisk me back, “Ratatouille”-style, to the McDonald’s on Dodge Street in Omaha, where I first remember sliding a hand pie from its sleeve, admiring how the cinnamon perfumed the air around me. Would I feel like a teenager again, intoxicated by sugar and all the possibilities that lie ahead in life?

The short answer is no. The fried apple pie had a familiar crackle that was a pleasure all its own. But the dessert was no match for my memory, no matter how false that memory may be. The fried McDonald’s pies of my childhood, rich and flaky and satisfying, remain out of reach by this contemporary reboot, with its palm oil sumptuousness. Is that really surprising, though? Real life can never compete with nostalgia.