When I was a kid, I used to watch my Mom bake apple pies. We were more a pie family than a cake family. Sometimes I helped out. Mom was the kind of person who welcomed help, seemed to enjoy help and never complained about the help, even when I'm sure she could have done it better and faster herself.

I've often heard it said that Mom's apple pie is always best. Why is that? I know that we always looked forward to having pie for desert and often listened to my Father's stories about how she made such good, flaky crust. He told the same stories over and over, so we always knew the end of the story before he finished. I think his favorite was about the time they had pie at someone else's house. The crust was so hard that he had to stab the pie and twist the fork in order to break the crust into small manageable pieces.

So, is Mom's apple pie always best? Actually, my mom's usual apple pie was not very good by culinary standards. She made a decent crust but generally used canned pie filling. The sauce surrounding the apples was thick and sweet. The apples themselves were uniformly firm and bordered on being tasteless. In season she made apple pie from fresh transparent apples from the tree in the back yard. Now, that was outstanding pie by anybody's standards.

Over the years I've had many different kinds of apple pie made by many different moms. Some pies were quite tasty but the vast majority of the pies were so-so at best. Nowadays, I just look at the pie. If it has the look of my Mom's pie, I might try it. But, if it is too different from hers, I'm just not hungry enough to give it a try.

So, I guess I still prefer Mom's mediocre apple pie – I don't know why. Maybe it reminds me of Mom. Maybe it reminds me of the wonderful aroma that permeated the house on baking day. Maybe some chemical path was established in my brain that allows memory to trump facts.

Whatever the reason, it's not peculiar to me. I see the results of it all the time in other people spanning a diverse range of topics. Belief always seems to have the winning hand even when facts seems to have the better cards.