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Pumpkin Pie: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• Amelia Simmons published two pompkin pudding crust recipes in American Cookery (1796), the first US cookbook.
• A typical sugar pumpkin weighs five to eight pounds and yields about two cups of cooked puree.
• Libby's, owned by Nestle, supplies more than 80 percent of US canned pumpkin from one Illinois plant.
• Classic pumpkin pie spice uses cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cloves, and allspice — five spices, not a blend.
• A nine-inch pie usually uses two to three large eggs plus about one and a half cups of evaporated milk.
• A correctly baked pie still jiggles slightly in the center when removed from the oven.

Pumpkin pie as Americans know it today did not exist in 1621. The first Plymouth feast almost certainly included stewed pumpkin and other native squashes, but the colonists lacked wheat flour for a crust and refined sugar for sweetness. The dish gradually became a custard pie over the next two centuries, baked in a pastry shell with eggs, milk, molasses, and warm spices. By 1796, Amelia Simmons published two recipes for pompkin pudding crust in American Cookery, the first true American cookbook, which fixed the format that families still bake on the fourth Thursday of November.

How a pumpkin becomes pie filling

Sugar pumpkins, sometimes called pie pumpkins, are smaller and denser than the field pumpkins carved for Halloween. A typical sugar pumpkin weighs five to eight pounds, and one pie usually needs about two cups of cooked pumpkin puree, equal to roughly one small pumpkin or a single fifteen-ounce can of canned pumpkin. Libby's, owned by Nestle, supplies more than 80 percent of the canned pumpkin sold in the United States, all grown from a single proprietary variety called Dickinson at one processing plant in Morton, Illinois. The pumpkin is cooked, pureed, and canned within hours of harvest, then stored in warehouses until the November pie rush.

The five classic pumpkin pie spices

Authentic American pumpkin pie spice contains cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg, ground cloves, and allspice. Cinnamon comes from the inner bark of Cinnamomum trees grown mostly in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Ginger is the rhizome of Zingiber officinale, native to Southeast Asia and dried before grinding. Nutmeg is the seed kernel of Myristica fragrans from the Banda Islands of Indonesia. Cloves are the unopened flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum from the same Indonesian archipelago. Allspice, often mistaken for a blend, is actually a single berry — Pimenta dioica from Jamaica — and was named because its flavor seems to combine the other four.

Pie crust, custard chemistry, and why it sets

The smooth surface of a pumpkin pie sets because eggs in the filling coagulate when heated. A standard nine-inch pie uses two to three large eggs mixed with about one and a half cups of evaporated or condensed milk, plus the pumpkin puree and spices. The filling is poured into a partially blind-baked crust and baked at 425 F for the first fifteen minutes, then reduced to 350 F for another forty to fifty minutes. A correctly baked pie jiggles slightly in the center when removed from the oven and continues to firm up as it cools. Cracks across the top usually mean the pie was baked too long or at too high a temperature.