The fall equinox has come to pass. The days are getting shorter, the night air is getting crispy, and though the leaves are still green and clinging to the trees, they got that stressed out look that says that, any day now, them suckers are going to explode with an autumnal color palette so intense it’ll will make Thomas Kinkade paintings jealous.
It’s fall, y’all, which means it’s high pumpkin season. Yes, I’m talking decorative gourd season. I’m talking pumpkin spice and everything nice life. Pumpkins are the centerpiece of an aggressively autumnal aesthetic that has become a “hashtag lifestyle brand” all on its own. Every year around this time, my Instagram is flooded with cable knit sweaters, PSLs and photoshoots in pumpkin patches. And I’m all for it! It is a colorful celebration that signifies another turn of the year. Time is but a circle and drinking pumpkin spice lattes and eating pumpkin spice donuts mark the passage of time. It feels cliche, but what is cliche if not a tradition?
Before you throw shade at fall’s favorite fruit (yes, from a botanical perspective, pumpkins are a fruit), there’s a lot to love about them. I’ve worked on a bunch of pumpkin stories over the years, so here are a few things I’ve learned that have really deepened my respect for these fancy gourds.
American as Pumpkin Pie
What do we mean when we say “American as apple pie?” Apple pies weren’t invented in America. In fact, they’ve been around since the Middle Ages and were a staple in European cuisines.
The term might stem from the fact that apples were brought over by European colonists. They were a taste of home as well as a commercially viable crop. But what really helped secure apple’s fame in America was how the fruit was used to incentivize westward expansion.
In this episode of WHYY’s Delishtory I explore how colonists used apples to claim land that wasn’t theirs, and I offer up a new all-American pie: The Pumpkin Pie. Think about it — the gourd is indigenous to North America, and turning it into pie takes European cooking techniques and applies it to ingredients sourced locally in the Americas.
Like I say at the end of this video: “The pumpkin pie is indicative of American cuisine. Like our Constitution, American cuisine adapts over time to reflect the people that are here. It takes what’s already been here and integrates ingredients and other cultural influences from other places around the world. As more people from more cultures come to America, they bring with them foods from their homelands that continue to add diversity and deliciousness to our culinary landscape. American cuisine isn’t like the apple pie, bringing something from another place to replace what’s already here. American cuisine is more like the pumpkin pie, which takes the best that everyone has to offer and creates something new. Making it American as pumpkin pie.”
The History of Pumpkin Spice
It might sound crazy, but most pumpkin spice products don’t actually contain pumpkin.
That’s because pumpkin spice is a blend of spices that are used to flavor pumpkins which, in the past, were not as flavorful as they are today, thanks to crossbreeding pumpkins with other kinds of squashes and gourds (see Libby’s Dickinson pumpkin, a variety that’s more butternut squash than it is pumpkin).
As I mentioned in the American as Pumpkin Pie episode, the first pumpkin spice recipe appears in the 1796 cookbook American Cookery by Amelia Simmons. The recipe was simply titled “Pompkin” and called for sugar, mace, nutmeg, molasses, allspice, and ginger to be mixed into a pumpkin pudding.
It wasn’t called pumpkin spice until 1936 in a Washington Post article titled “Spice Cake Of Pumpkin Newest Dish: Delicacy Tempting to All Appetites and Easy to Prepare. Ideal Dessert for Family Dinner, Healthful for Children." At this point in history, everyone is making their own pumpkin spice based off of their own personal preferences. But things changed in the 1950’s when McCormick came out with a tin of “Pumpkin Pie Spice.” It would still take over 40 years for pumpkin spice to permeate fall culture, starting in 1996 with the first pumpkin spice scented candle.
My journey down the pumpkin spice rabbit hole began years ago when I was doing Friday Night Cookies over Facebook Live. It also includes an argument about what is a pumpkin versus a squash, which is a whole other story in itself.
Please excuse the video because it was 2016, Facebook Live was a new product, so it freezes a lot, but the information is really interesting. Plus we taste test a bunch of pumpkin spice cookies, and my cat interrupts us from time to time, which is very cute.
Cooking pumpkins
Yes! Pumpkin varieties have come a long way. Though pumpkin spice was developed to season bland, stringy fruit (again, pumpkins are a fruit), new kinds of pumpkins have been brought to the market that are meaty, tender and oh so flavorful. Take these delightful porcelain doll pumpkins available now at Riverwards Produce in Philadelphia.
But there are many many different kinds of cooking pumpkins, some of which you can find in this round up I published last fall with USA TODAY 10Best.
Roasted Pumpkin with Red Curry Vegetables and Rice
After seeing a delicious curry dish beautifully presented in a pumpkin in an issue from Food & Wine last fall, I decided to give it a try, changing a few things here and there to my liking.
Pumpkins can feel cumbersome to work with. Their outsides are hard and their insides can be stringy and full of seeds. But it helps to find a breed of pumpkin that is easy to cook with. I happened to find some “butterkins,” a cross between a butternut squash and a pumpkin, at my local farmer’s market and I was really happy with the result. It had the iconic shape of a pumpkin, but its skin and meat were tender like that of a butternut squash.
Ingredients
- 2 small cooking pumpkins
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 cup of chopped onions
- 1 cup of chopped carrots
- 1 cup of chopped mushrooms
- 1 cup of uncooked rice
- 1 can of coconut milk
- 1/4 cup of water
- 3-4 ounces of red curry paste
- 1 teaspoon of fish sauce
- Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Preheat stove to 350 °F
- Chop mushrooms, carrots and onions.
- Sauté in a pot the carrots and onions in olive oil.
- Meanwhile, cut tops of pumpkins off (set aside) and core out the center, removing seeds and pulp.
- Once onions are a little translucent, add coconut milk.
- Add 3 - 4 ounces of red curry paste to the pot.
- Add 1 cup of rice.
- Add 1/4 cup of water and allow the curry to simmer, cooking the veggies and the rice.
- Add a teaspoon of fish sauce.
- Once rice is mostly cooked, add mushrooms and stir into the curry. Allow it to simmer until rice is cooked.
- Stuff the pumpkins with the curry, rice and vegetables.
- Place the tops back on the pumpkins, covering the stuffing.
- Put pumpkins in the oven at 350 for 30-40 minutes, until the pumpkins become soft.