Fall has arrived and with it, pumpkins! Covering stoops across the US, pumpkins are a part of the aesthetics of fall as well as the menu. While we already shared the ancient origins of pumpkin pie spice, we want to dive into the ancient Indigenous origins of pumpkin pie too!
Pumpkins are intimately tied to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Domesticated as far back as 10,000 BC/BCE, squash was a cornerstone of the diet of Central American peoples. Cucurbita pepo pumpkins were the earliest to be domesticated and include squash, a variety of summer squash, winter squash, and gourds. Indeed, if it weren’t for domestication, it’s likely that they would have gone extinct, according to new research. Before human domestication, the bitter squash depended on megafauna like ground sloths and mastodons to eat and then disperse the seeds. With the extinction of megafauna in the Americas, it’s likely that pumpkins would have died out too (and many varieties did). But thanks to Stone Age peoples, some pumpkins were rescued from the brink.
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People across the world still use gourds to make tools and containers like these made in Mali
It’s likely that early humans were put off by the original bitter taste of C. pepo, but they bred the fruits to create hard containers and tools. It’s speculated that over many generations of intentional cultivation, the fruit became less bitter and more desirable to eat by humans. (For your own dried gourd, check out Civil War Unboxed.)
By the time of the Olmecs, ancient Mesoamerican farmers were growing squash among other Indigenous-domesticated foods like maize and beans. There is evidence of squash cultivation throughout the Americas from the Maya to Ancestral Puebloans to Northeastern Woodland peoples including the Powhatan who used the Three Sisters method.
For the early English colonists in both Virginia and the Northeast, pumpkin was a key part of their diet. With wheat crops so prone to failing, pumpkins were more often eaten than bread. So where did pumpkin pie come in?
Pies, usually defined as a crust with a sweet or savory filling inside, have been popular in Europe since antiquity with the first pie pastry originating in Ancient Greece. In Medieval Europe, pies of all types were ubiquitous, and the English brought their pie-heavy diets to the Americas, using ingredients available like native berries and, of course, pumpkins.
Three Sisters method of planting corn, beans, and pumpkins together. Digital and pencil drawing by Anna Juchnowicz.
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First edition of American Cookery by Amelia Simmons
The earliest custard-style pumpkin similar to what we’d see as pumpkin pie today was published in the first American cookbook. American Cookery by Amelia Simmons was published in post-colonial Connecticut in 1796. It included a recipe for Pompkin Pie with directions: “One quart [pumpkin] stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, laid into paste No. 7 or 3, and with a dough spur, cross and chequer it, and baked in dishes three quarters of an hour.”
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pumpkin pies became a staple of Thanksgiving dinners in the United States and Canada and pumpkins became a seasonal food versus a year-round staple.
Today, pumpkin pie filling is most often made from fresh “sugar pumpkins,” a type of Connecticut field pumpkin which is still a varietal of the original Cucurbita pepo from pre-Columbian Central America. Canned pumpkin puree, including the kind made by producer Libby, is generally made from a Cucurbita moschata type called Dickinson pumpkin which more closely resembles a butternut squash. C. moschata was also cultivated by pre-Colombian Indigenous Americans.
Will you be having pumpkin pie this fall? If so, remember the paleolithic Indigenous people who made it possible!
